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The Alpha Software Forum Participation Guidelines

The Alpha Software Forum is a free forum created for Alpha Software Developer Community to ask for help, exchange ideas, and share solutions. Alpha Software strives to create an environment where all members of the community can feel safe to participate. In order to ensure the Alpha Software Forum is a place where all feel welcome, forum participants are expected to behave as follows:
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  • Be open to new ideas and suggestions
  • Stay on topic


Be sure all comments and threads you post are respectful. Posts that contain any of the following content will be considered a violation of your agreement as a member of the Alpha Software Forum Community and will be moderated:
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  • Encouraging of others to engage in the above behaviors.


If a thread or post is found to contain any of the content outlined above, a moderator may choose to take one of the following actions:
  • Remove the Post or Thread - the content is removed from the forum.
  • Place the User in Moderation - all posts and new threads must be approved by a moderator before they are posted.
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  • Permanently Ban the User - user is permanently banned from the forum.


Moderators may also rename posts and threads if they are too generic or do not property reflect the content.

Moderators may move threads if they have been posted in the incorrect forum.

Threads/Posts questioning specific moderator decisions or actions (such as "why was a user banned?") are not allowed and will be removed.

The owners of Alpha Software Corporation (Forum Owner) reserve the right to remove, edit, move, or close any thread for any reason; or ban any forum member without notice, reason, or explanation.

Community members are encouraged to click the "Report Post" icon in the lower left of a given post if they feel the post is in violation of the rules. This will alert the Moderators to take a look.

Alpha Software Corporation may amend the guidelines from time to time and may also vary the procedures it sets out where appropriate in a particular case. Your agreement to comply with the guidelines will be deemed agreement to any changes to it.



Bonus TIPS for Successful Posting

Try a Search First
It is highly recommended that a Search be done on your topic before posting, as many questions have been answered in prior posts. As with any search engine, the shorter the search term, the more "hits" will be returned, but the more specific the search term is, the greater the relevance of those "hits". Searching for "table" might well return every message on the board while "tablesum" would greatly restrict the number of messages returned.

When you do post
First, make sure you are posting your question in the correct forum. For example, if you post an issue regarding Desktop applications on the Mobile & Browser Applications board , not only will your question not be seen by the appropriate audience, it may also be removed or relocated.

The more detail you provide about your problem or question, the more likely someone is to understand your request and be able to help. A sample database with a minimum of records (and its support files, zipped together) will make it much easier to diagnose issues with your application. Screen shots of error messages are especially helpful.

When explaining how to reproduce your problem, please be as detailed as possible. Describe every step, click-by-click and keypress-by-keypress. Otherwise when others try to duplicate your problem, they may do something slightly different and end up with different results.

A note about attachments
You may only attach one file to each message. Attachment file size is limited to 2MB. If you need to include several files, you may do so by zipping them into a single archive.

If you forgot to attach your files to your post, please do NOT create a new thread. Instead, reply to your original message and attach the file there.

When attaching screen shots, it is best to attach an image file (.BMP, .JPG, .GIF, .PNG, etc.) or a zip file of several images, as opposed to a Word document containing the screen shots. Because Word documents are prone to viruses, many message board users will not open your Word file, therefore limiting their ability to help you.

Similarly, if you are uploading a zipped archive, you should simply create a .ZIP file and not a self-extracting .EXE as many users will not run your EXE file.
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v5 can't be broken? (Open letter to Selwyn)

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    #1

    v5 can't be broken? (Open letter to Selwyn)

    Just to pass along a word about v5 from a beta tester..

    We have been running v5 in a full production high transaction order entry shop since its inception. Part of my job as a beta tester is to try to break things. I'm good a breaking things. Used to break things any time I could get my hands on them. Really good at breaking things made of glass. Unfortunately, every time I can break v5 Selwyn, Cian, and the other wizards at Alpha fix them. It makes me feel like I'm not doing my job. Maybe I should stop letting them know...

    Anyways...

    v5 is looking pretty sweet. I haven't had time to play with anything near all the new features. Unfortunatlety v5 just sits their and laughs in our faces when we try to break it. My staff is beginning to have some serious moral problems. I'm paying a bonus if they can break v5 and they aren't making any money.

    I'd love to say that I can break v5 but I can't. Does this mean that my over 20 years of hardware and software beta testing has resulted in a failure, of that the wizards at A5 are just that damn good? It's too early to tell, but I bet I can still find SOMETHING that I can break. If not I'll have to shoot myself (or one of my programmers).

    Maybe, if I can find some little used function or command and can stick it in the some very complex code, I might get lucky and break it. Unfortunately, at this point, the only complaints we have are the colors in the code editor. Obviously I must whip my staff and offer incentives/bonuses to break the damn thing. Maybe I should hire some new graduate. I don't know. I'm running out of things to break and am feeling worthless. Maybe it's time to start firing programmers.

    Come on , Selwyn, give us something to break. We're getting bored writing code that works all the time. Hey, Cian, can we bribe you with cookies to put a bug in v5? Maybe some nice home made white chocalate macadamia nut cookies? Name yr price.

    We can't keep giving the boss everything he wants within a few hours. It makes us look bad. If we want to keep our reputation as miracle workers we have to have a crappy product so we can complain about how it slows our development. I have an idea. Maybe for the next few beta builds you can pretend you're Microsoft and put in a few errors? Please? (Think cookie bribes...)

    About the only way I can get v5 to crash is to try to coordinate a power failure with the buildiung manager. This is unacceptable. It takes too much work.

    Please, as a consideration to your beta testers, put a bug or two in v5 on your next beta release. It's getting borng testing a beta that't stable enough to be a marketable product.
    Tags: None
    #2
    RE: v5 can't be broken? (Open letter to Selwyn)

    So it can't be broken is VERY GOOD NEWS!
    Can someone at Alpha Software send me the beta version? I have a peculiar tendency to break program at the most inopportune moment and bring red faces. If I cannot break it, then I know we are sitting on, as I said so in earlier thread, a SOLID GOLD-MINE!

    So....Please send me the URL to download the beta for testing.

    Regards,

    Miku
    from Hong Kong

    Comment

      #3
      RE: v5 can't be broken? (Open letter to Selwyn)

      Jim,

      I've been looking forward to V5 for a while. Thanks for giving us a tid-bit on what we can expect.

      I appreciate your time.

      Thanks,
      Mike
      Thank you,
      Mike Konoff

      Comment

        #4
        RE: v5 can't be broken? (Open letter to Selwyn)

        Hey Jim,
        I have something you can try to see if it works in Alpha5v5...I can't get it to work in v4. In fact, I just posted my problem - see Sub-report limitations for a hint.

        The calculated fields I am using in Table 1 are based on one field named LOS (for Length of Stay). This is a calculated field rule that subtracts an exit date from the entry date and divides it by 30 (for a count of how many months).

        This LOS field is then used in a report to tell me how long the person stayed at that facility. In the group footer, I have written the following calculations to come up with an average.

        Since some records won't have an end date (because the person hasn't left that facility), then I don't want that placement considered when calculating the average length of stay. So, I have written a calculated field to count the number of records only if there is data in the LOS field.

        (Actually, the calc counts the number of records whose LOS is >.00001 - because it was easier than dealing with having it count only records whose END DATE was not blank.)

        The problem is that I have designed another report on a set which contains TABLE1 as a sub-report. I have created the EXACT SAME CALCULATIONS, but they don't behave the same. No matter what I do, I can't seem to get the calc to count only the number of records that contain data in the LOS field. It keeps giving the result of 0.

        My calculations are as follows:

        NOTBLANK: if(LOS>=.00001,1,0)

        TOTALRECORDS: total(Calc->Notblank,GRP->name)

        TOTAL_LOS: total(Table1->LOS,GRP->name)

        AVERAGE: Calc->total_los/Calc->totalrecords

        Now, I have played around with the grouping, also to no avail. I've used the sub-report footer to hold the calculations - nada. I've created a groupbreak called NAME (as is used in the above calculations) - nada! I've used the name of the sub-report for the groupbreak name in the above calculations - nada!

        I can get it to count the number of records - but can't get it to county only those records with data in LOS.

        Maybe if you re-create this, you can break it (or find a solution, if nothing else - and give your programmers demotions!)

        Thank you in advance if you find time to work on this.

        Wanda

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