Handfasting this weekend, Free Comic Book Day/Rocky/More the next weekend, then two weekends later, Disneyland!

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#ElfQuest like you’ve never seen it..On April 6, the Pini elves come to life! Catch a sneak peek here: http://bit.ly/hyVZh0

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WonderCon fb gallery now up – it’s just the preview set, unprocessed and rough – http://on.fb.me/fGNquu #wondercon

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Facebook users are now able to opt out of receiving Group chat messages. That option does in fact exist, accessible via the “Edit Settings” button on the group’s page.

Although Facebook’s addition of a more sophisticated Groups has added some beneficial privacy features, there have been numerous complaints, particularly when it comes to email and chat notifications. While the ability to send chat messages to any online group member might be great in some circumstances, as Group Chat allows any member to send messages to everyone in the group who’s online, clearly there can be some problems.

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I did not realise that declared variables in SQL are effectively “static” when used in rowsets. That is, the following code:

create table roles(role nvarchar(50))
GO
insert roles
select ‘Administrator’ union
select ‘Editor’ union
select ‘User’
go

declare @roles nvarchar(1024)
select @roles = isnull(@roles + ‘, ‘, ”) + role from roles
select @roles
go

drop table roles
go

yeilds “Administrator, Editor, User“.

Now instead of returning rowset of roles for a user and then concatenating results in client-side code, I can just write a function similar to:

create function fnGetUserRoleVerbose(@userid int, @delim nvarchar(2) = ‘, ‘)
returns nvarchar(1024)
as
begin
declare @role nvarchar(1024)

select
@role = isnull(@role + @delim, ”) + roles.name
from
users
inner join users_roles
on users.id = userid
inner join roles
on roleid = roles.id
where
users.id = @userid

return @role
end

and then just do this:

string roles = (string) SqlHelper.ExecuteScalar(
myConnectionString,
CommandType.Text,
string.Format(“select dbo.fnGetUserRoleVerbose({0}, default)”, userId));

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