October 11, 1999

Custom Right-Mouse-Click Menus

Question: How do I customize the mouse’s right-click menu? That is, instead of Cut, Copy, Paste, Select All, Delete in Edit-Masks, etc., I would like to display my custom menu, which includes Save, Refresh, etc. Answer: In order to have your own custom menus you need to define the menu

Formatting Data in Tabular Form

Question: I use SQL 6.5 in an industrial setting. I have an application that writes a new record into the database every time a pallet blocks a photoswitch. After 24 hours I run a report that tells me how many pallets have blocked that switch every 15-minute period. The query

Verifying Whether a String Contains a Number

Question: Is there a function that gives me a simple way to know whether a string contains a number or not? I’ve already done something with ASCII values, but this doesn’t seem to be efficient. Answer: Actually the ascii() function is quite fast and that is the way to tell

Counting Specific Records

Question: How do I count the records for a specific field? For example, I’m building a table for homes in a county. In the table are fields for cities and addresses for homes. I want to be able to get the results of how many homes are located in city1,

Group By Statement

Question: How do I use the Group By statement in SQL Query? Answer: Group By is a way to collapse a result set around a textual value summarizing its contents by some aggregate value. Typically, we look for a count or a sum of some numbers with respect to some

Setting Up a Hot Backup Between Two SQL Servers

Question: I want to set up a hot backup between two SQL servers on two different NT machines. In other words, if one of these servers goes down I want the second server to continue to work (transparently). If this is possible, how do I change my client applications to

Filtering Junk E-mail from My In-box

Question: Could you please explain how to trap the e-mail ID from the In-box, so that I can filter my incoming junk mails? Answer: Filtering junk mail is tricky business because the senders of junk mail are so tricky. There are several techniques to doing it with varying degrees of

Journal Entries Appearing to Users

Question: Why do Journal entries within a (slightly) customized contacts database in Public folders only appear to the user who logged the Journal entry? All other fields in the contact entry appear fine to everyone else. Answer: That issue is by design, actually. Journal entries are only placed in your

Redundancy After SELECT

Question: I need to have a result from a SELECT query with all the rows containing “word1” in column 1 and all the rows containing “word2” in column 2. If a row contains both, I want it to appear twice. What query should I do? Answer: I’m not sure I