Using a spreadsheet to simplify data entry

I've used a spreadsheet for data entry on a number of occasions. It is quite handy! All it requires is a string concatenate function, and a bit of cleverness. This is great for "quick-n-dirty" data entry, or for searches. The comma separated list is usually used for "SELECT * FROM TBL WHERE X IN ( ## excel text goes here ## )".

# to build a comma separated list
=CONCATENATE("'", A2, "',")

# insert new records
=CONCATENATE("INSERT INTO #t (Nbr, Code, Descr) VALUES ('", A4, "', '", B4, "', '", C4,"');")

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Updated ActiveRecord Code Generator

Today, I updated the ActiveRecord Code Generator a bit. I checked in changes to use primary and foreign key details from INFORMATION_SCHEMA. The original code used naming conventions to decide what various fields were used for - ID = Primary Key, Field_ID = Foreign Key to table Fields. If you want to use naming conventions, let me know and I can add a setting in App.Config to allow this (along with any "real" key constraints).

How does Rails scaffolding select HTML input tags?

Recently, a reader saw my fix for SQL Server booleans, and asked me a followup question: why does Rails display a yes/no selection instead of a checkbox? The short answer is look in {RUBY_HOME} /lib/ruby/gems/1.8 /gems/actionpack-1.10.2 /lib/action_view/helpers, but your path may vary depending on whether you are using gem, "edge rails", etc. Anyway, look in the file "active_record_helper.rb" for a method called "all_input_tags", and notice that it calls "default_input_block" if you don't supply an input_block. Now notice that "default_input_block" creates a label and calls "input(record, column.name)" which in turn calls "InstanceTag#to_tag" which finally looks at the datatype and maps boolean to a select tag. Perhaps a wiser Rails explorer can provide us with the rationale for this, but I guess we could add a MixIn for InstanceTag that redefines the to_tag() method, or just do a dirty and unmaintainable hack l...

Castle Active Record Code Generator

I have finally released my Code Generator to Google Code as Active-Record-Gen . What does it generate? It generates ActiveRecord classes mainly, but I have used it to generate stored procedures and sys-admin scripts as well. This code generator does not (yet) generate a full Windows application project or a Mono-Rail web site, but the generated code could be used in either. In fact, with a few tweaks, this could be used to generate NHibernate "poco" and .xbm files. If you want to know more, look at the screen shots above, or head over to Google Code and run it. In my haste to make my first EXE release before supper, I forgot to add the Template directory, which should be at the same directory level as the EXE and config files. I just (1.5 hours later) uploaded a new EXE, but 2 people have already downloaded the EXE (not the source though). As for the basic table object, it is built with the following assumptions: Table name is plural, class name is singular. Field ...

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