First of all, Happy New Year and all the best for 2007 ! It all looks fairly good around here and plenty of work is around.
To start off in the new Year, while developing a CAB / Smart Client Software Factory application based on Oracle, I was facing the same problem twice and can't wind myself out of solving it.
The problem is simple: A DataView containing several rows with columns holding Integer (numerical) values and strings. For one certain Use Case, the application needs to go through the Table and create a DataView that filters out rows that don't contain a certain string. As the user is always King and thus can enter lower- or uppercase search terms, we want to ignore the case and return everything that just matches his query. In SQL Server, you'd enter a Filter a la: " searchColumn LIKE 'searchTerm'". SQL Server knows by itself that it should ignore the case in this case.
(column = 'xY' takes case into account, while column LIKE 'xY' returns everything from xy to XY etc.).
Oracle doesn't... Even using the keyword LIKE causes Oracle to care about case. Now you'd say:" Ha, just uppercase both the search term and the column a la UPPER(column) LIKE (searchTerm)". Simple enough... BUT: Microsoft doesn't support such a keyword in the filter pseudo-query language...
There seems to be no decent solution for this so far... Well done Microsoft..... Parts of the .net Framework and the ideas behind it are truly great and awesome, but on some other ends, some developers/marketing guys definitely should have been a bit more attentive.
Maybe someone knows a solution that can be used for dataview filters in .net 2.0 ? i doubt it... unfortunately.
