Ok, how many of you have been out at the store at the last minute getting those flowers for Valentine’s Day, grabbed the box of chocolates, and then suddenly remembered that you needed a card as well?  To top it all off you were running late in getting back to your house for that special V-Day dinner?  Arrggh….panic is starting to set in.

So you quickly run down to the greeting card aisle, quickly survey the demilitarized zone of Valentine’s Day cards, find one that looks nice and has words that seem appropriate and zip over to the checkout counter.  Ok, we’re nearly complete…but wait….we need to write something inside of the card and sign it….oh no!

So we look frantically through the glove compartment box, flip the sun visors, look in the change drawer, the middle console, under the seat, all in the hopes of finding that single writing implement that is most likely missing a cap, has a glob of ink dangling from the tip and has been severely chewed on the end so much that you could dislodge a penny from the ashtray by using it as a chisel.

This is usually the moment where for some strange reason you’ve luckily managed to hit all of the green lights for a change and are actually hoping for a red light for that mere 30 seconds you need to write those unending words of love and compassion that will sweep your honey right off of her feet. 

Ok so you get a red light finally and then warped pen in hand you stroke those loving words on the open side of the card right on the steering wheel.  However you then push too hard on the Love…Me….which of course beeps the horn at the car in front of you and awards you the friendly one finger wave from the driver ahead of you.

So you get back to the house in time to go out to dinner, you calmly stroll on into the house, flowers, chocolates, and your novelette of a Valentine’s Day card in hand, and proudly give the items of your affection to your sweetheart.

She gasps for a moment, just so happy she has married a man who still likes to make Valentine’s Day special…grabs the flowers, the chocolates and the card sets them down to give a very welcomed and very earned Valentine’s Day smooch.

Finally without another word, she sniffs the elegant scent of the roses, mouth waters over the chocolate treats she’ll be enjoying later tonight, and then opens the card…which magically says on the front….

“This Valentine’s Day I wanted to say Something Special…”

and on the inside…

“You’ll Do.”

Funny enough…I don’t think she ever read the other side of the card I wrote on.  Happy Valentine’s Day Everyone!

Ok, it’s Thursday Tips Day, and I wanted to show you a very handy tool you can be using to speed along your development time, or help your web department speed their development time along at your own company.

The tool is called an Object Generator or an O/R Mapper.  Some also like to call them “CRUD” Tools.  CRUD is an acronym we geeky coders like to use that stands for:  Create, Read, Update, Delete.  In almost every basic web application out there today, we are asked to interface with some type of database or datasource.  And in almost every instance of that interfacing we (the coders) are doing some type of call to the database.  It could be reading one record, getting several records, updating a record, or even deleting one. 

Writing these calls can be very mundane.  Ones I usually save for my new coders to do <insert evil laugh here>.  However, these CRUD or Object Generator tools can help things along tremendously in development time, which then allows us or your web developers, time to focus on things that are usually overlooked or zipped through at the end of a project such as field validation, styles, SEO, etc.

For ASP.net we personally like to use O/R Mapper (www.ornetmapper.com).  The thing I personally like about this open source tool is the simple fact that the developer continues to really improve this tool with newer and more awesome releases than its prior.  As of this updated blog, the latest version is version 6, and it’s come a long way and really could be the easiest most comprehensive way to develop the business logic for your next .NET project.

A Screen Shot of O/R Mapper (the ASP.NET Object Mapper Tool)

And using the code is even easier than using the tool itself in .NET.  So here’s a quick example.  Let’s say you have a table called Users and in your datagrid you have your typical select button which triggers your onSelect event in your code behind.  So now you want to populate a few text boxes in your form for editing.  Here it goes….in C#.net

          Users u = new Users();
          UsersAssembler a = new UsersAssembler();
          UsersCriteria c = new UsersCriteria();
          c.Set_Username(CriteriaBase.AVAILABLE_STRING_OPERATORS.EQUALS, “doug”);
          u.ReadSingle(c);
         
Now that you have the information loaded into the “u” object…you just assign your textboxes accordingly….

          tbUsername.Text = u.Username;
          tbPassword.Text = u.Password;
          tbFirst.Text = u.FirstName;
          tbLast.Text = u.LastName;
      
          etc.

Did you blink and missed it?  Yes it’s that quick.  You can also retrieve lists of results and do things like auto-bind it to your gridview, etc.  Really really cool.

For PHP, we personally like to use POG.  (www.phpobjectgenerator.com) This nifty little online tool will allow you to not only create the code classes you’ll need to interface easily with your web application, but also build your tables for you.

      

A Screen Shot of POG (the PHP Object Generator Tool)

Once all of your code and tables are built, its a snap to interface with them.  Let’s say you have a table which has your user’s vital information in it and you want to retrieve a list of users that have signed up in the past week.

       <?PHP
                  
                   // Create a new instance of our POG class for Users
                   $u = new users();

                   // Call the GetList Function to bring us back a list of users meeting our criteria
                   $userList = $u->GetList(array(array(“signupdate”,”>=”,”2008-02-16 00:00:00″)));

                   // Now loop through the results and display them for the end user to view
                   foreach($userList as $user)
                   {
                         echo ‘<p>User Name: ‘ . $user->username . ‘ <br />Name: ‘ . $user->first . ‘ ‘ . $user->last . ‘<br />Signup: ‘ . $user->signupdate . ‘</p>’;
                   }
          ?>

Pretty simple huh?  And you can send as many criteria you want in additional arrays all in that same GetList() function.  So the speed at which you get results and have the ability to update them are fast and easy.

So take some time to check out POG or send this blog link to your favorite PHP coder.  They very well may thank you for it, however knowing most coders they’ll probably say they already knew about it, thanks for the link, and then when people aren’t looking will start to use it all the time.  Ha!!  Happy coding!

Doug.