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How to exclude subversion hidden directories (.svn) using Ant

Posted: 2007-06-04   |   Categories: Java, Programming   |   Tags: Ant, SVN

Many Java developers already know that Ant is a great build tool. Besides a build tool you also need a good version control system to manage the various versions of your code. For this purpose I often use Subversion. Now, there might be time when you need to exclude the Subversion hidden directories from, for example, a backup Ant target you built. To do that you just need to use the following attribute to your zipfileset or other directory-based task:

How to commit a single DML statement in Oracle (PL/SQL)

Posted: 2007-05-24   |   Categories: Oracle, Programming   |   Tags: DML, Statement

Sometimes you might need to commit a single INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE statement and not the whole main transaction. In such a case you can use an AUTONOMOUS TRANSACTION which is a feature available since Oracle 8i. The trick is to encapsulate the statement in a procedure and use the pragma AUTONOMOUS_TRANSACTION. Here is an example, suppose you have a table, your_table, which has just one column of type NUMBER and you want to insert the value 1, irrespective of the state of the main transaction:

How to format a decimal number in JavaScript

Posted: 2007-05-04   |   Categories: JavaScript, Programming

In JavaScript you can use a built-in method to format a decimal number so that it is displayed using, at most, x decimal places. Here is an example:

   
var num = 3.1356;
var x = 3;
alert(num.toFixed(x)); // displays 3.136

As you may have guessed the method is toFixed. It accepts one parameter which is the number of decimal places to take into account.

Note: The number gets rounded as you can notice by the example above.

How to put a set of rows into a single row in Oracle

Posted: 2007-04-27   |   Categories: Oracle, Programming

In Oracle you can execute hierarchical queries using some cool operators–CONNECT BY PRIOR, START WITH and the pseudocolumn SYS_CONNECT_BY_PATH, namely. However, using your fantasy you can exploit these operators to put in a single row–with each item separated by the next through a separator, such as a comma–what you have in multiple rows. For example if you have more than one telephone number in different rows and you want to put them in a single comma-separated row you could use a query similar to the following: