Jeff Smith Blog

Random Thoughts & Cartesian Products with Microsoft SQL Server

Splitting a single DataTable into Parent/Child DataTables for Hierarchical Processing (e.g., nested ASP.NET Repeater controls)

In ASP.NET, we often would like to output "grouped" data on our web pages, like this: Customer Product Sales-------- ---------- -----ABC FoundationProduct 1 $200Product 2 $437Product 3 $523The XLZ CompanyProduct 1 $240Product 2 $892Product 3 $395 The easiest way to do this is with nested Repeater controls; one for the outer group (Customers, this case), and within that Repeater's ItemTemplate we'd have another Repeater control for the details (Products). Read more →

Some HTML / ASP.NET Thoughts …

On a particular real estate website, we have a "Property Summary" section that contains each property's name, the address, a phone number (if it exists), and a contact email address (if it exists). Read more →

Using LINQ with SQL (link)

There's a great series of posts over at Scott Guthrie's Blog covering LINQ, a new feature in the upcoming version of Visual Studio ("Orcas"). Check it out; I have not had a chance to play around with it yet, but it certainly looks very interesting. Read more →

ASP.NET 1.1 – Appsettings in Web.config

It's great to be able to put settings in the Web.Config file for my ASP.NET projects. The problem for me, though, is that when I use System.Configuration.ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings(name) to return a setting that doesn't exist in the file, an empty string ("") is returned, when ideally I would like an exception to let me know that something is missing or mispelled in my config file (or application code). Read more →