I'm creating an application that will take a number of user inputs, store the data for a while, and eventually (at the end of the day) export it to an excel file.
An example might be that a user would input what they did throughout the day. Breakfast/At Home/for 10 minutes. Then later on they would input Coding/At Work/8 hours. Then later on Commuting/Subway/15 minutes. Etc.
I can handle the user interface, and the exporting to excel.
I'm just wondering what might be the best way to store that data and display it back to the user while the program is running. I'm used to working with macros in Excel itself, where I could simply store each row of data in another row on the excel spreadsheet itself.
I would still like a spreadsheet-like display, so that the user can go in to each data point and correct any mistakes. But I am making this as a standalone application using visual basic. Fortunately, I think the ListView or DataGridView tools will let me do this.
At the moment the method I'm thinking of using is simply to store all the user inputs in an array. But I would have to ReDim the array and increase its size each time the user created a new entry.
I can already see a problem with this, however, and that is that an array would have to be constantly stored in active memory. If the user's computer were to crash then all the data would be lost for good.
I'm really a rookie here, so I could use some guidance on how to store a bunch of user inputs like this.
You can use a database file. A local Sql Server Compact Editon database (a single file) that will store your data. You can use Entity Framework to interact with this database.
If you want to use Code First (generate your database from your code) use this:
https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/680116/Code-First-with-SQL-CE
If you want to use Database First (generate your entities from your database) use this:
http://erikej.blogspot.com/2013/11/entity-framework-6-sql-server-compact-4_25.html
You can also use SQLite or other kind database file, but i like SQL Server CE
Related
I have a financial system with all its business logic located in the database and i have to code an automated workflow for transactions batch processing, which consists of steps listed below:
A user or an external system inserts some data in a table
Before further processing a snapshot of this data in the form of CSV file with a digital signature has to be made. The CSV snapshot itself and its signature have to be saved in the same input table. Program updates successfully signed rows to make them available for further steps of code
...further steps of code
Obvious trouble is step#2: I don't know, how to assign results of a query as a BLOB, that represents a CSV file, to a variable. It seems like some basic stuff, but I couldn't find it. The CSV format was chosen by users, because it is human-readable. Signing itself can be made with a request to external system, so it's not an issue.
Restrictions:
there is no application server, which could process the data, so i have to do it with plsql
there is no way to save a local file, everything must be done on the fly
I know that normally one would do all the work on the application layer or with some local files, but unfortunately this is not the case.
Any help would be highly appreciated, thanks in advance
I agree with #william-robertson. you just need to create a comma delimited values string (assuming header and data row) and write that to a CLOB. I recommend an "insert" trigger. There are lots of SQL tricks you can do to make that easier). On usage of that CSV string will need to be owned by the part of the application that reads it in and needs to do something with it.
I understand yo stated you need to create a CVS, but see if you could do XML instead. Then you could use DBMS_XMLGEN to generate the necessary snapshot into a database column directly from the query for it.
I do not accept the concept that a CVS is human-readable (actually try it sometime as straight text). What is valid is that Excel displays it in human-readable form. But is should also be able to display the XML as human-readable. Further, if needed the data in it can be directly back-ported into the original columns.
Just a alternate idea.
We are building an iOS app with Parse.com, but still can't figure out the right way to backup data efficiently.
As a premise, we have and will have a LOT of data store rows.
Say we have a class with 1million rows, assume we have it backed up, then want to bring it back to Parse, after a hazardous situation (like data loss on production).
The few solutions we have considered are the following:
1) Use external server for backup
BackUp:
- use the REST API to constantly back up data to a remote MySQL server (we chose MySQL for customized analytics purpose, since it's way faster and easier to handle data with MySQL for us)
ImportBack:
a) - recreate JSON objects from MySQL backup and use the REST API to send back to Parse.
Say we use the batch operation which permits 50 simultaneous objects to be created with 1 query, and assume it takes 1 sec for every query, 1million data sets will take 5.5hours to transfer to Parse.
b) - recreate one JSON file from MySQL backup and use the Dashboard to import data manually.
We just tried with 700,000 records file with this method: it took about 2 hours for the loading indicator to stop and show the number of rows in the left pane, but now it never opens in the right pane (it says "operation time out") and it's over 6hours since the upload started.
So we can't rely on 1.b, and 1.a seems to take too long to recover from a disaster (if we have 10 million records, it'll be like 55 hours = 2.2 days).
Now we are thinking about the following:
2) Constantly replicate data to another app
Create the following in Parse:
- Production App: A
- Replication App: B
So while A is in production, every single query will be duplicated to B (using background job constantly).
The downside is of course that it'll eat up the burst limit of A as it'll simply double the amount of query. So not ideal thinking of scaling up.
What we want is something like AWS RDS which gives an option to automatically backup daily.
I wonder how this could be difficult for Parse since it's based on AWS infra.
Please let me know if you have any idea on this, will be happy to share know-hows.
P.S.:
We’ve noticed an important flaw in the above 2) idea.
If we replicate using REST API, all the objectIds of all Classes will be changed, so every 1to1 or 1toMany relations will be broken.
So we think about putting a uuid for every object class.
Is there any problem about this method?
One thing we want to achieve is
query.include(“ObjectName”)
( or in Obj-C “includeKey”),
but I suppose that won’t be possible if we don’t base our app logic on objectId.
Looking for a work around for this issue;
but will uuid-based management be functional under Parse’s Datastore logic?
Parse has never lost production data. While we don't currently offer automated backups, you can request one any time you like, and we're working on making all of this even nicer. Additionally, it's easier in most cases to import the JSON export file through the data browser rather than using the REST batch.
I can confirm that today, Parse did lost my data. Or at least it appeared to be so.
After several errors where detected on multiple apps (agreed by Parse Status twitter account), we could not retrieve data for an app, without any error.
It was because an entire column of one of our class (type pointer) disappeared and data was not present anymore in the dashboard.
We are using this pointer column to filter / retrieve data, so the returned queries and collections were empty.
So we decided to recreate the column manually. By chance, recreating the column, with the same name and type, solved the issue and the data was still there... I can't explain it but I really thought, and the app reacted as if, data were lost.
So an automated backup and restore option is mandatory, it is not an option.
On December 2015 parse.com released a new dashboard with an improved export feature.
Just select your app, click on "App Settings" -> "General" -> "Export app data". Parse generates a json-file for every class in your app and sends an email to you, if the export-progress is done.
UPDATE:
Sad but true, parse.com is winding down: http://blog.parse.com/announcements/moving-on/
I had the same issue of backing up parse server data. As parse server is using mongodb that is why backing up data is not an issue I have just done a simple thing. downloaded the mongodb backup from the server. And then restored it using
mongorestore /path-to-mongodump (extracted files)
As parse has been turned to open source.Therefore we can adopt this technique.
For accidental deletes, writing a cloud function 'beforedelete' to backup the current row to another class would work.
For regular backups, manual export of changed records (use filter) will be useful. For recovery this requires you to write scripts / use import option (not so sure) in data browser. You could also write a cloud function replicate data on your backup server (haven't tried this yet).
However there are some limitations to cloud code that you should consider before venturing into it:
https://parse.com/docs/cloud_code_guide#functions-resource
I am currently developing a Rhomobile application. I have a backend database which holds customer information. I have got from the webserver a csv string (or XML - I am able to parse the XML using REXML) which contains all the customers. Each time I sync the device I am going to reset the customer table on the device and re-insert all data from the backend database. I am not using RhoSync and the device will be using property bag.
Is it possible to use the CSV or XML data to insert into the customers table? If so, how would I go about it?
At the moment the only option I can see that would work would be to manually loop through the CSV/XML and insert into the database manually; this isn't very elegant.
Any help will be much appreciated, sorry if this is a dumb question; still relatively new to this framework.
I have come to the conclusion that the only way is to loop through the csv/xml, which with the help of a database transaction this doesn't take long.
Using fixed schema also increases the performance a lot as property bag has to do column inserts (so if you have lots of columns - there is lots of inserts per record).
Also in Rhomobile garbage collection is turned off, so if you are trying to process large data sets your device will quickly run out of memory:
GC.enable
The above solves this issue
I am working on a WP7 app that contains
CategoryGroups
Categories
Products
The rows for each of these entities are populated on first run of the application.
The issues is that when the app gets published, the rows in each of the entities will change (added, deleted, modified). I would like some suggestions on how I should handle this? Any pointers to existing code samples will be great?
I am using an object oriented database to store my entities. The app also allows the user to add their own entities (which get added to the database as personalized (flagged) entities). One solution I was thinking was to read an xml file from the server and then loop through the database entries and make the necessary modifications in the database. So, on the first run, all the entities will just get inserted. On subsequent runs, if the version number attribute in xml is different, then the system populated data is reloaded from xml but the user data is preserved.
Also, maybe only check for the new xml file on the server when internet connection is available and only periodically (like every 2 weeks).
Any other suggestions are welcome. If there is a simpler, cleaner way - please share.
Pratik
I think it's fair to say that this question has nothing to do with WP7 and everything to do with finding an efficient way to to compute and deliver update deltas.
Timestamp your items. When requesting an update, specify the time of last update. You server can trivially query for items newer than this and return a delta. At the client (ie in the phone) it is not necessary to store a last update time because you can simply add one second to the most recent timestamp in the items present on the phone.
I have a web application in Spring that has a functional requirement for generating a CSV/Excel spreadsheet from a result set coming from a large Oracle database. The expected rows are in the 300,000 - 1,000,000 range. Time to process is not as large of an issue as keeping the application stable -- and right now, very large result sets cause it to run out of memory and crash.
In a normal situation like this, I would use pagination and have the UI display a limited number of results at a time. However, in this case I need to be able to produce the entire set in a single file, no matter how big it might be, for offline use.
I have isolated the issue to the ParameterizedRowMapper being used to convert the result set into objects, which is where I'm stuck.
What techniques might I be able to use to get this operation under control? Is pagination still an option?
A simple answer:
Use a JDBC recordset (or something similar, with an appropriate array/fetch size) and write the data back a LOB, either temporary or back into the database.
Another choice:
Use PL/SQL in the database to write a file using UTL_FILE for your recordset in CSV format. As the file will be on the database server, not on the client, Use UTL_SMTP or JavaMail using Java Stored Procedures to mail the file. After all, I'd be surprised if someone was going to watch the hourglass turn over repeatedly waiting for a 1 million row recordset to be generated.
Instead of loading an entire file in memory you can process each row individually and use output stream to send the output directly to the web browser. E.g. in servlets API, you can get the output stream from ServletResponse.getOutputStream() and then simply write result CSV lines to that stream.
I would push back on those requirements- they sound pretty artificial.
What happens if your application fails, or the power goes out before the user looks at that data?
From your comment above, sounds like you know the answer- you need filesystem or oracle access, in order to do your job.
You are being asked to generate some data- something that is not repeatable by sql?
If it were repeatable, you would just send pages of data back to the user at a time.
Since this report, I'm guessing, has something to do with the current state of your data, you need to store that result somewhere, if you can't stream it out to the user. I'd write a stored procedure in oracle- it's much faster not to send data back and forth across the network. If you have special tools or its just easier, sounds like there's nothing wrong with doing it on the java side instead.
Can you schedule this report to run once a week?
Have you considered the performance of an Excel spreadsheet with 1,000,000 rows?