[Dclug] dashboard - an xml based reminder

[Johnson, Steve (NIH/OD/ORS) [E]]

Everybody must have their system for this, but it is one of the programming tasks I find has to be efficient to be enjoyable -- what with all the editing and updates.  But anyhow, and recognizing that this c-sharp code will raise some eyebrows coming as it does from the MS empire (but please realize - c-sharp is an open source project, well, open source if you know how to read C and C++).
So, even realizing I'm not going to get an engineering award for this, I still would like to share a glimpse of how I'm working the reminders program.  It dawns on me that more of the querying could be done with the xml itself, rather than running regexs.
What I do is simply edit the xml file, a list of the reminders as so:

<Phrases><Phrase date="Nov-01-2010" track_number = "" amt="" who="anonymous">toner cartridges</Phrase></Phrases>

<Phrases><Phrase date="Nov-01-2010" track_number = "" who="anonymous2">board meeting</Phrase></Phrases>

<Phrases><Phrase date="OCT-30-2009" who="daylights">end DST</Phrase></Phrases>

//code start here

TimeSpan interval = new TimeSpan();

XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();

doc.Load(@"\Phrases.xml");

XmlNode root = doc.DocumentElement;

XmlNodeList nodeList = root.SelectNodes("//Phrase[@date]");

foreach (XmlNode currentNode in nodeList) {

try {

if ( Regex.IsMatch(currentNode.Attributes["who"].Value, "daylights") ){

holdRemindersString += currentNode.Attributes["who"].Value + "\t\t" + interval.Days + " day\t" +

currentNode.Attributes["date"].InnerText + "\r\n\r\n"; }}

catch {}

finally{}

Obviously that is just a glimpse but the idea is to use node attribute who as a selection criteria.  Given that xml as a standard works with dates and numeric values, those string comparisons using regular expressions has got to be a hard way around.  Depending on the value of the node attribute (which does not need to maintain order as part of the structure of the xml document) I concatonate all that type reminder and display that string on one screen location; so forth for other category of reminder.








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