Validate form fields in Patron Edge Online

Patron Edge Online can be a double-edged sword when it comes to data entry. A user has the ability to enter his own address and phone information so that you don't have to try to track it down elsewhere later on, but when you don't enforce any kind of formatting standard, searching or reporting on it in the system can become a pain. Luckily PEO has a built-in feature that allows you to validate form fields using something called a regular expression. If that phrase means nothing to you, don't worry. We have a regular expression builder that will walk you through it. If you are familiar with JavaScript regular expressions, you can write them manually and bypass the builder tool.

1. Go to Administration, System Setup, User-Fields Rules
2. Edit the row for Email
3. Click the regular expression builder button beside Regular Exp 1
4. From the Begins with drop-down list, select 'any char' that occurs 'once or many'
5. In the Followed By section, select 'the char', enter the @ symbol, and select occurs 'once'. Then click Add
6. Change Followed By to 'any char' that occurs 'once or many' and click Add
7. Change Followed By again to 'the char', enter a period and select occurs 'once'. Click Add again
8. In the Ends With section, select 'any char' occurs 'once or many'
   
9. To test, enter various combinations of values in the Validate field and click Validate. An alert box will tell if the values pass the rule or not.
10. When finished, click OK.

If you are familiar with creating regular expressions, you can type directly into the Regular Exp 1 field and skip the builder. In the above example, you can type the expression ^.+@.+\..+$ directly into the field. Advanced users note: the regular expression field does not support the Replace or Split methods, only the Test method.

What other regular expressions are you using to keep your data in a nice, clean format? Leave a note in the comments.

Patron Edge 3.310 patch 7 is now available

It's that time again folks. Patch 7 for Patron Edge is now available for download. This patch fixes a couple of critical issues related to posting from Patron Edge to The Financial Edge. If you do not integrate with The Financial Edge, there's no need to download the patch at this time. The following Knowledgebase solution references the fixed item:

BB480350 - GL Pre-Post Report is out of balance

Make sure you have a patch plan and can handle the downtime it takes to apply a patch, and don't forget to see Knowledgebase solution BB346664 to make sure any products you integrate with are compatible.

Six tweaks to improve performance

Update your compatibility level - If you updated at some point from SQL Server 2000 to version 2005, chances are your database is still running in SQL 2000 compatibility mode. Microsoft claims performance gains by updating to 2005 so make sure that your database is taking advantage of it.

Keep things tidy - Imagine you are making dinner and having a conversation at the same time, and end up putting a corkscrew in the wrong drawer. The next time you need the corkscrew it takes longer than usual to find it, right? So after a while you go and reorganize everything to find things quickly again. Just like you need to reorganize the kitchen cabinets every once in a while to find the things you need, you also need to reorganize your hard disk and your database to make data easier to find. See this article for defragmenting the physical filesystem, and Knowledgebase solution BB120081 for steps on rebuilding the database indexes.

Update statistics - SQL Server keeps statistics about all of your tables and idexes. This includes things like the number of rows in a table and helps SQL determine the best way to build a query and return data. Keeping statistics up-to-date allows queries to run their fastest. Check out Knowledgebase solution BB137060 for a how-to.

Split your database files - Reading and writing from the hard disk is one of the biggest performance bottlenecks of SQL Server. To reduce the time it takes to read and write from a disk, put the database file on one hard disk and the log file on a second disk (on the same machine). See solution BB113761 for steps to do this. If you have three hard disks, put the ‘Tempdb’ database on a third disk for the best performance. It’s not too difficult to do, but you’ll want to consult your system administrator first.

Check out your memory - Another great way to improve performance is to ensure that the server has enough memory. Right-click the taskbar and select Task Manager. On the Performance tab, check the Commit Charge total against the Physical Memory total. If the Commit Charge is regularly jumping higher than the Physical Memory, the machine is attempting to convert hard disk space into memory, which is slow. This is a good case to buy more memory for the server.

Give SQL an edge over other applications - By default, Windows is configured to give running programs priority over background services. We can switch this so that SQL Server and other services have priority over programs run in the foreground. To do this, go to Control Panel, System, Advanced. In the Performance section click Settings and click Advanced in the new window that comes up. Finally, set the Processor Scheduling section to Background Services and click OK.

Are there other tweaks you've found to get more out of your database server? Share your experience in the comments.

Filling in the blanks in reports

Imagine this scenario: You have started using the ZIP Code Analysis report pretty regularly to decide where to spend your advertising dollars, but you know that some people slip through without having the marketing or ZIP Code information entered by a user and your data could be more accurate. In Patron Edge, you can use the Audit Order Details feature to go back in after the fact and update the records that are missing info.

This is an okay tool on a one-off basis, but the real advantage of it is the ability to globally change things. For example, you have a huge line out the door for the July 4th Extravaganza and you need to get people through the line as quickly as possible. You decide to turn off the requirement to capture a marketing source to trim a couple of seconds per sale. At the end of the day, you know that your recent radio spot was the reason everyone came out to visit but you need to get this into the system for reporting. To add in the information, do this:

1. Go to Administration, Client Management, Audit Order Details
2. Use the filters to get the date range and sale types you need
3. Right-click and choose Select All
4. Click Edit and change the Marketing Source to reflect the spot you aired on WTKT
5. Now run your marketing reports as needed and you'll have the most accurate information, without having to export to a spreadsheet and then play with the numbers