My first blog entry
By Martin Zietarski On Saturday, 18 February 2012

Finally I got my own blog, developed by myself.

The goal of my own blog is to get together all the specific web solutions, code samples, code snippets and tutorials I use in my daily routine. As web developer you are facing every day new challenge to deliver quickly a solution. My blog should be first of all a knowledge base for myself and of course for others.

I hope you will find it  useful.

I will address some few general topics like use and development with .NET web forms, themes and skins, as well database driven web sites.

Please stay tuned.

Lets start with Easy Stuff - SQL Except CLause
By Martin Zietarski On Thursday, 29 March 2012

Couple days ago I developed our companys Organization Chart based on simple SQL database table which contains all employees as well objects such are for example printer, fax or departments. Each employee reports to a manager or department.

As we realized that the chart is going to be very wide in the horizontal view - We started to reduce some of the node's and entities.

A SQL statement with the EXCEPT clause saved me a lot work and showed on the other hand that my C# template to draw the nodes - actually works smooth.

Here is the SQL sample code:

SELECT  EmployeeID, LastName, FirstName, ReportToID
FROM    Employee

EXCEPT
SELECT  EmployeeID, LastName, FirstName, ReportToID
FROM    Employee
WHERE   (ReportToID = 123456)

[...]

You can repeat the EXCEPT part of the query as often you need.

So it works like a MINUS to your data set. I was able to reduce my deep sized organziation Chart to a minimum.