A client of mine had made a request to take the total of a column from the MS DataGrid and in turn, spit it out into a TextBox. Alright... So my first reaction was to loop through each individual record in the grid. It would have worked, but it would not have been pretty, nor speedy by any means. Then I got to wondering if the DataGrid itself had means of calculating the total of a column. I did some quick research on the subject and alas, I could not find a total for the DataGrid. From there I got to thinking, "Well, if the grid is really just an interpretation of it's DataSource, maybe I should be looking at the DataTable?"

Bingo.

textBox1.Text = "$" + dtPurchases.Compute("SUM(Amount)", string.Empty).ToString();

textBox1.Text = "$" + dtPurchases.Compute("SUM(OrigEquityAmt)", "UserName = 'Billy'").ToString();

 

At first, this project of converting my links sounded very tedious. Initially I was thinking I'd have to write some elaborate routine on publishing an HTML page after writing a blog, similar to how blogger does it. Not only would I have to make an HTML page for each blog, but I would have to update the extra content (such as "last 10 blogs") in case I wanted to archive them, keep tabs on a main page, rss feed, etc etc etc. Didn't sound appetising at all.

Dissapointed and overcome by this method, I set on a search to find a nice and easy route. Lo' and behold, Microsoft never ceases to amaze me. URLmappings totally made my life easier. They allow you to set a sort of virtual path to your page, yet, still taking in querystring information.

For example, the link to my recent blog, "Lucky Man". It's original (and working) path is:

The after effect of URLMappings is as follows:

Sweet, huh? All I had to do was create an XML file that is referencable to my web.config file. For example, I have a file called URLMapping.xml. This contains all my URL Maps. Example:

Now, I reference URLMapping.xml from the Web.Config file of my website:

That's all there is to it! So now when I save a blog, it opens the URLMapping.xml into a Dataset, quick add the links and save it back. Couldn't be easier.