Select Into A Dictionary With LINQ

This is neat, instead of doing it the long way, if you need to pull your data into a dictionary, you can do it like this:

 

Dictionary<string, int> facilityNpis = db.Facilities.Where(c => c.NPI.Trim().Length > 0).Select(a => new { a.NPI, a.ID }).AsEnumerable().ToDictionary(b => b.NPI, b => b.ID);

Sort a Bound DropDown In WPF

This came up a while back and had me a bit flustered for a bit.  You’re getting some data that you don’t have a ton of control over that you’re binding right into a ddl in WPF and you want to sort it because well, sorting is important.

It isn’t too late!  You can do the following in your constructor and it’ll look fine.

ddlAssignTo.Items.SortDescriptions.Add(new SortDescription(“Username”, ListSortDirection.Ascending));

Rebuild All Indexes On A Database In One Call

Normally I’d leave this sort of thing to a DB to deal with but I stumbled on this a few months back and thought it was rather clever.

USE MyDbName
GO
EXEC sp_MSforeachtable @command1=”print ‘?'”, @command2=”ALTER INDEX ALL ON ? REBUILD WITH (ONLINE=OFF)”
GO
SELECT * FROM sys.Dm_db_index_physical_stats(Db_id(‘MyDbName’),NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL) — This bit just tells you the results

Add a Primary Key To Your SQL DB

It comes up from time to time where you have a DB you need to work with and you notice that some bastard didn’t put a PK on it.

Heres a quick way to wedge that in without too much fuss.

ALTER TABLE Accounts ADD ID int identity(1,1) not null
GO
ALTER TABLE Accounts ADD CONSTRAINT pk_Accounts_ID primary key(ID)
GO

Keeping a Change History With LinqToSQL

So in a lot of applications you want to keep track of what your users are doing to your precious data.  What was it and what did they change it to?  I remember setting up entities with a bunch of isDirty flags or adding to a list in set methods which are all fine but if you’re using LinqToSQL, you’re already covered.

Just before you do a submit changes all you have to do is call GetModifiedMembers on your table object.  Like so:

var foo = currentView.db.Accounts.GetModifiedMembers(currentView.EditAccount);

Then you can loop through any and all results to get .Member.Name, or .OriginalValue or .CurrentValue

PS.  I realize that you can just do this invisibly by overriding OnChanging classes but if you need to be selective the above is a solid method.