Information on SoftPro ProForm with some general computer tips and techniques, with a bit of me.

SQL convert "yyyyMMdd" integer or string to a Date that works in SoftPro

The last few weeks I’ve been working with Web based Reporting for SoftPro ProForm.  It’s been fun creating management review pages with dials and lights.

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I’ve enjoyed combining multiple report outputs on one concise easy to ready web page.  Along the way, it’s been necessary to display SoftPro Database formatted date fields in a grid.  They come through in 20130524 or “yyyyMMdd” format.  It was easy enough to format that in a grid as “yyyy-MM-dd” format which worked until I started exporting the grids to Excel, when the formatting failed.  So I began a search to fix it, at the SQL level.

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FedEx Web Services went down today

The Web is an interesting place, when we start distributing systems over diverse physical locations fun things can happen. One person can have access to a resource, while another one is denied.  Chicago says but it works for me while Columbus says, it’s down for us.  Today after a 4 or so hour outage of FedEx Web Services that’s precisely what happened as the systems were coming on line.

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Word 2007 and 2010 Insert Key doesn’t work

Microsoft for some unknown reasons after 35 years of consistent behavior decided to change the way the Insert key works in Word. Normally pressing the insert key toggles between Insert and Overtype.  Most people live in Insert mode, but sometimes Overtype is nice, the engineers at Microsoft decided you no longer needed Overtype mode.  Who knows why.

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Data Collector Mass Update

Today I needed to add 25 fields to Data Collector.  Where as it’s totally doable using the correct application, it is the slow way. And since we work on development servers, the same changes need made on the production servers, so the time is duplicated.  There is a quick and safe (mostly safe) way to update ProForm Data Collector, from SQL Server Management Studio

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ProTrust PTWIN-130 Error window

imageToday’s fun call of the day was related to ProTrust having a Ledger locked for editing. The Error (PTWIN-130) is displayed when someone attempts to add a transaction to the ledger.   No one knew who or why, but it’s been like that for days.  There’s a right way and a wrong way to fix this particular problem.  We’ll talk about the wrong way first.

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