First Project

OMG Tally,

To what degree is this to be automated?

My gosh.... how familiar are you with Object oriented programming.

I really don't feel that this is an appropriate assignment.

ReneeC at 2007-9-10 >

Ok.... The very first step is to carefully and precisely specifiy what you want your code.

Today I received an excellent note from the excellent SJ Whitely it discussed the following:

(SJ I hope you don't mind me posting this and crediting you....)

When asking a question they need to state:

1. This is what I am trying to achieve (“I want to randomize a deck of 52 cards (numbered 1 to 52)”, or “I have an array of Potion Objects, and want to make sure each one only gets picked once”)
2. State the problem: (“Each time I use the rnd() function it brings back duplicate numbers”)
3. Show some code (“Here’s what I have so far”) – make sure it’s pertinent!! Designer code is useless!! Ensure it’s the absolute bare minimum to reproduce the error/undesired behavior.
4. Tell us which line the error occurs on (“It crashes on line ‘x=…’ with error ‘Object is….’)
5. Tell us what alternatives tried and why they didn’t work.
6. Reiterate what you want in more ‘programming’ terms (“How do I build an array of numbers which are randomly arranged without duplicates?”)

I’d like to see people try doing what they want with a new project with only the code that causes the error (usually this fixes the problem, or, at least points directly to the problem). I know I don’t really read posts with more than one page of code – I pretty much ignore it and move on.

I know that some people have trouble expressing what they want in programmatical terms. That’s OK. Use English to describe it, using similes as necessary to make the point clear (“Deck of cards” implies a fairly narrow band to work with – integers, perhaps number range 0-51and/or 1-10 and picture cards, etc. - , rather than “I have some numbers that I need to sort”…)

These are the steps you need to be going through. When you have spec'ed what you need. We can help you.

Right now a spec may seem laborious. But.... it will communicate what you need and the process of preparing it will also shake bugs out.... before they occur.

ReneeC at 2007-9-10 >

All faxes are currently being sorted by our receptionist and since they are all tiff files this is a very time-consuming operation. We have the option of going to the folder on our Small Business Server to try to find our own, but with assigned names that make no sense this too is difficult. That is the reason I will use Omnipage to convert pages to PDF format. So, yes all files are in central location and VB App would go on receptionist's computer.

I was hoping to distribute 75% with program using Keywords and reduce her workload. Heaven knows, she's busy enough. So what I need is to Open each file, search for Array and ,if true, send to appropriate mailbox, close that file and continue with next. Each mailbox user would have maybe 3 keywords, and there are about 24 users. Timeframe is short as I need to get SQL Server 2003 and Project Server set up on our Server 2003 very soon to fix some real problems we have.

Tally622 at 2007-9-10 >

It appears that Omnipage does have an API. Begining at version 12.

ReneeC at 2007-9-10 >

Tally,

You don't speak as the beginner you described yourself to be earlier.

You don't have to put it into a central folder. It might be sort of nice to do this with a database. If you keep the optic version, SQLE, if you did just documents Access.

This way look up and keywords would be in one tight little bundle.

ReneeC at 2007-9-10 >

there is something to be aware of re Access and images. Access will Bloat in size with lots of images.

Were i to use Access in this, I'd be sure to compress on shut down and also to use record compression and decompression.

But this sounds fun and interesting.

I just looked under COM in the vs2005 project references and found a type lib for the Omnipage scanning wizard scnwizC.dll.

interesting....

ReneeC at 2007-9-10 >