Cylon Programming Principle

Introducing the Cylon Programming Principle: "In well-designed software, there is only one god." (And his name is Singleton?)

Eclipse Forms vs. Context Menus

If you are using Eclipse's form toolkit infrastructure, you might run into an problem where you try to install a context menu but it does not appear. If you are using FormToolkit.adapt(Composite) to adapt a custom composite to a form, you must install your menu after adapting it. Otherwise, your menu will be replaced by the parent's menu. This may seem to be reasonable behaviour -- except when the parent widget has no menu at all.

XML Tricks in SQL Server 2005

Here are some stupid pet XML tricks in SQL Server 2005...

To XML-escape text stored in a column:

SELECT CAST('' AS XML).query('sql:column("v.v")')
FROM (SELECT '<>''"&' AS v) AS v

To XML-escape text stored in a variable:

DECLARE @myText AS NVARCHAR(MAX)
SELECT @myText = '<>''"&'
SELECT CAST('' AS XML).query('sql:variable("@myText")')

To extract individual nodes from XML:

SELECT result.node.query('.')
FROM (SELECT CAST('<x><a/><b/><c/></x>' AS XML) AS x) AS x
CROSS APPLY x.x.nodes('/x/*') AS result(node)

Use XML to perform concatenation aggregation:

;WITH
  strings AS (SELECT 'a' AS s UNION SELECT 'b' UNION SELECT 'c')
SELECT
  (SELECT s AS 'text()' FROM strings FOR XML PATH(''))

Generate nested XML, avoiding FOR XML EXPLICIT:

SELECT
  1 AS "@id"
, 2 AS "a/b/c"
, (SELECT v AS "e"
   FROM (SELECT 1 AS v UNION SELECT 2) AS v
   FOR XML PATH('d'), TYPE )
, 3 AS "text()"
, 4 AS "data()"
FOR XML PATH('element'), ROOT('root')

Use XML namespaces:

;WITH XMLNAMESPACES
( DEFAULT 'urn:default'
, 'urn:a' AS "a"
)
SELECT 1 AS 'a:y' FOR XML PATH('x')