Adaptive Path releases excellent Date Slider widget
The guys over at Adaptive Path have released a Flash-based Date Slider that can be controlled via JavaScript.
The Data Slider widget is pretty darn slick. What makes this Date Slider unique is that it is design to show a bar graph of results and you use the slider to narrow down to a specific date range. You could then use the selected range to zoom in on the data, or maybe show a detailed report history from that time frame. Here's a screenshot:
SQL: Searching formatted varchars with non-formatted strings
I'm working on some legacy code that uses a MS SQL Server 2000 database. In one of the tables, there's a phone number field that is a varchar column. The application essentially treats a "Phone Number" as straight text, so there can be any type of value in this column.
Normally when I design a "phone number" field, I always remove formatting and rely on the view to display the phone number correctly. This provides consistency and allows for easy searching of phone numbers.
The problem I've run into is that I need to provide phone searching capabilities that will find a phone number regardless of how it's formatted in the column, but I can't change the existing data. Unfortunately, MS SQL Server 2000 doesn't have support for Regular Expressions and it's built-in pattern searching isn't powerful enough to do what I want to do.