Limit date range in a DatePicker - windows-phone-7

First of, is there any real documentation of the toolkit ? What I would like is to specify a range of selectable dates. For example I don't want to display dates before today. If the user select a start date of Jan. 27th 2012, I want to allow only dates after these for the return date

Documentation is a little bit sparse for the toolkit - your best bet is to look in the source of the sample app but they don't cover all the scenarios.
The default control doesn't seem to support a minimum or maximum value for the selected date, but if you download the source you should be able to modify it according to your needs. The layout of the source is pretty straightforward and you should be able to find an acceptable place to add the code, the only thing you need to decide is how you handle it from a UI perspective. In my opinion, you are better off handling the range check once the control returns - if it is an invalid date, pop up a message and re-show the control.

I've found that in the absence of documentation, the WindowsPhoneGeek blog (in this specific case see link here) usually does a good job of explaining the Silverlight Toolkit components in their various articles.
These articles can be a great help when following ZombieSheep's advice of taking a look at the toolkit sample code.

Related

How to disable dates before today in DatePicker tool in Windows Phone? [duplicate]

First of, is there any real documentation of the toolkit ? What I would like is to specify a range of selectable dates. For example I don't want to display dates before today. If the user select a start date of Jan. 27th 2012, I want to allow only dates after these for the return date
Documentation is a little bit sparse for the toolkit - your best bet is to look in the source of the sample app but they don't cover all the scenarios.
The default control doesn't seem to support a minimum or maximum value for the selected date, but if you download the source you should be able to modify it according to your needs. The layout of the source is pretty straightforward and you should be able to find an acceptable place to add the code, the only thing you need to decide is how you handle it from a UI perspective. In my opinion, you are better off handling the range check once the control returns - if it is an invalid date, pop up a message and re-show the control.
I've found that in the absence of documentation, the WindowsPhoneGeek blog (in this specific case see link here) usually does a good job of explaining the Silverlight Toolkit components in their various articles.
These articles can be a great help when following ZombieSheep's advice of taking a look at the toolkit sample code.

Library javascript for making histogram

i work on asp.net mvc3 project , and i have to display histogram in view depending on data coming from action, can you suggest me any library javascript that can be easy to use and make good histogram, please any syggestion !!
http://www.highcharts.com/ - excellent integration and nice looking (free for non-commercial)
http://www.jqplot.com/ - open source, nice looking as well (free as in beer)
http://g.raphaeljs.com/ - another open source, well maintained
http://www.flotcharts.org/ - built specifically for JQuery (if that is what you are using)
Basically, take a look at these and others, find one that looks good and will easily plug in to your existing architecture and roll.
If you just want to sort the data into bins, take a look at histogram.js.

text mining/analyse user commands/questions algorithm or library

I got a financial application and I wish to add to it the ability to get user command or input in textbox and then take the right action. for example, wish the user to write "show the revenue in the last 10 days" and it'll show the revenue to him/her - the point is that I wish it to really understand the meaning of the question, so the previus statement will bring the same results as "do I got any revenue in the last 10 days" or something like that - BI (something like the Wolfram|Alpha engine).
I wonder if there's any opensource library or algorithm books or whatever that I can use to learn the subject. Regards to opensource libraries - I don't mind which language it'll be written in.
I've read about this subject and saw many engines and services (OpenNLP, Apache UIMA, CoreNLP etc.) but did not figure out if they're right for my needs.
Any answer or suggestion is welcome.
Many thanks!
The field you're talking about is usually called "natural language processing". It's hard, and an active field of research. There are various libraries which you could consider based on your preferred programming language and use case:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_language_processing_toolkits
I've used NLTK a little bit. This field is seriously difficult to get right, so you might want to try to restrict your application to some small set of verbs and nouns such that people are using a controlled vocabulary in the first instance, and then try to extend it beyond that.

Inline data representation

I would like to represent data that gives an overview but allows them to drill down in an inline fashion - so if you had a grouping of say 6 objects the user could expand the data and it would show the 6 objects immeadiately below it before any more high level data.
It would appear that MSHFlexgrid gives this ability but I can't find any information about actually using it, or what it's limitations are (can you have differing number of fields and/or can they have different spacing, what about column headers, indentation at for the start, etc).
I found this site, but the images are broken (in ie8 and ff3.5). Google searches show people just using the flat data representation but nothing using the hierarchical properties). Does anyone know any good tutorials or forums with a good discussion about pitfalls?
Due to lack of information about using it, I am thinking of coding my own version but if anyone has done work in this area I haven't found it - I would of thought it would be a natural wish for data representation. If someone has coded a version of this (any language) then I wouldn't mind reading about it - maybe my idea of how to do it wouldn't be the best way.
You might want to check out vbAccelerator. He has a Multi-Column Treeview control that sounds like what you may be looking for. He gives you the source and has some pretty decent samples.
The MSHFlexGrid reference pages and the "using the MSHFlexGrid" topic in the Visual Basic manual?
Sorry if you've already looked at these!

Time zone list issue

For my application, I'm importing the calendar event from google calendar. The only problem which I'm facing is Time zone list. I'm getting the timezone as output from google calendar xml, which I have to check with time zone list and add time accordingly... so from where I can get this standard time zone list.. or some other alternative to achieve the same.
If you're using Java, use Joda Time - the time zone ID given by Google Calendar will be one the Joda Time understands. The standard TimeZone class may well understand it too, but I think Joda is more likely to.
Assuming you're seeing all the VTIMEZONE stuff that goes along with the event, you can ignore the details - just use the ID.
Unfortunately there are some time zone IDs which have changed over time - I can't remember any examples off-hand, but you may need to do some translations if you're provided with the "old" names.
If you're using .NET, you really need to be using .NET 3.5 and the TimeZoneInfo class. Unfortunately that uses Windows names instead of Olson IDs, but there's a translation list available somewhere (I can dig it out if you want).
If you're not using either of these platforms, you basically need to find a library which supports Olson Zoneinfo names. (That wikipedia article has some helpful links at the bottom.)
I would definitely try to find a library which will be able to give you the relevant information based on an ID, rather than using the rules given back in the calendar entry. Time zones change over time, and the zoneinfo database contains historical and future information, but that can't be easily encoded in the calendar entry.
There are some good articles about working with Erlang date/time libraries here:
http://www.trapexit.org/Category:DateTimeRecipes
Hope it helps.
Check out these function
calendar:datetime_to_gregorian_seconds({Date, Time})
calendar:gregorian_seconds_to_datetime(Seconds) -> {Date, Time}
Converting to "gregorian seconds" and correcting the timezone-offset and converting back to date form is half the solution.
There is no library to access timezone datafiles in Erlang/OTP, and as far as I know there is no third part library to get at it either. So your options are to yourself convert the available timezone databases to something usable from Erlang, or to settle for just knowing a few of them.
You know, unless you want to start a project to read timezone data in Erlang. :-)

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