News from October, 2008

...according to MSN Live Search. Actually Bath and Body Works is one better. Surprised, I used Google to query - and I got less colorful results back - pretty much what I wanted.

Search results for the word "http"
Search results for "http" on MSN Live Search	Search results for "http" on Google

If you noticed, the font "family" has changed to the one used by New York Times - I like its Typography which uses a Serif font. Its a hack but will do for now since it is a one word change.

In the default-theme.css file in your confluence directory, change the "helvetica" font-family css rule to "Georgia" ....should look like this:

font-family: Georgia,serif;

I was reviewing eXist documentation today. Ran into an article on how you can check for code quality using the http://pmd.sourceforge.net/ . What struck me was that you can express the checking rules in Java as well as XPath. The reason I am excited about the latter style is because recently I have been realizing that XPath has precise and very concise expressive power.

Since OO classes exhibit an inherent inheritance either through Type hierarchy or composition, I have been wondering lately about using XPath bindings to query static code (Java) ; this has been particularly true in recent projects when reviewing code using IntelliJIdea's very effective code analysis system - I felt a "realtime" Java Static code query system using XPath would be cool! I am very glad someone else did the work for me! I am thinking of getting the book : http://pmdapplied.com by the author of the codebase.

What a small world: eXist, XPath, Java, IntelliJIdea!

If you want to format a number such as 8988981.00 to look like 8,988,981.00, you would do it like this:

• Works in <xf:input> element too (according to documentation)
• Works only with 'ref' attribute and does not work with 'value'

Discovered what appears to be a problem in calculating big decimals (greater than 1,000,000 ). I have a requirement where the total is a sum of all line items.

Each of the $ amounts on the line items is an xs:decimal . The sum is also a decimal. When the sum is greater than 1,000,000, [Orbeon] seems to store the result in an exponential format (e.g. 1.000000E6). This representation is invalid for an xs:decimal (the pink background is a style applied to invalid fields).

I solved the problem by casting the result back into a decimal:
- XPath to the rescue.

Now it looks the way it is desired: