I successfully dealt with a coding problem today that had me completely flummoxed for about 24 hours. In a nutshell, I was asked to take an existing report, which contained a chart, and break it down into 5 separate reports which would add up to the whole. It was requested that I put each of the separate reports into tabs on a single page, such that the user could click on a tab and see, for example, all of the information for “Group A,” and click a different tab for “Group B” and so on. Each report was to be laid out exactly as every other report.
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| Gravestone near my Sylco, TN, campsite |
No problem, right? That’s what I thought, too. I just added some url variables to the existing report so that the underlying queries would be limited by that variable. Took about 10 minutes, and I could call any of the 5 reports and they would display perfectly.
Until I put them into a tabbed framework. At that point, the chart – which is about 85% of the report – stopped showing up on any except the first tab. I fought with this stupid problem for just about all of yesterday and a good portion of today, trying different tab layouts, different variable combinations, different underlying pages, different chart libraries…
I spent a lot of time on Google. I was about ready to just give up and tell the client that I couldn’t do the tabs.
Then I got a brainstorm – I changed the name of the underlying query based on the variable that was received in the URL.
Bingo. It took some additional tweaking to make things work out, but in the end I figured out that the chart, which is created by javascript, had to have different names for every variable in every instance of itself.
Success is sweet at times.
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| Saturday night campfire, Sylco, TN |
After work, I got home and realized that I’ve more or less neglected my tuba for the last week; so I practiced, on and off, for about 2.5 hours. When it got to the point that I was physically unable to play anything above a 2nd-line F, I decided that I’d worked myself enough. That was about 30 minutes ago.
Tomorrow at work, I’ll just be rewriting some old queries for my PM (the data was coming from an Oracle database and it’s been moved to a MySQL one, so all of the reports have basically stopped working). That should take up most of the day and be a fairly relaxing, non-thinking, type of thing. If I get time, I’ll watch a couple of the stupid training videos that I have to watch.
I’ve taken Friday off in order to go see Betsy Jones give a faculty recital on her euphonium at Valdosta State University. I’m not sure about the rest of the weekend. There’s a possibility that I’ll stay in Valdosta on Friday and head to Savannah on Saturday, but nothing’s really set in stone.
Rehearsal with the band went okay last night (on alto horn). I spent some time last week working with the horn, playing Arban studies and long tones and generally not looking at the actual band music at all. I’m more concerned with tone and intonation than anything else at this point.
I like playing. Wish I’d figured that out 25 years ago.
TWD