Salient Soft

I have often used file sharing on OneDrive. This can be used to create a shortcode url link which can be passed to anyone else for use. The following options are available:

• A link may be emailed to a set of people, or copied directly as text and forwarded/send using any other means you like. It can also be used as the target of another url, such as a bit.ly one or in my case, a sailent soft shared url.
• A link may be view only or editable
• A link may be password protected by clicking the settings gearwheel on the intial share dialog for a file, and an expiry date may also be set. Note however that these options are only available for a paid for office 365 onedrive service, i.e. you must pay to upgrade a free account before you can password protect.

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Various points/gotchas worthy of note, all discovered whilst learning about React…

1/ You can define components in their own classes – to do this you extend the component class and define the render method. However, this is now considered legacy in favour of just writing a function which returns the necessary jsx/tsx. This is discussed here, and the migration of components from legacy classes to using functions instead is discussed here.

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I just hit this when editing a couple of existing posts.

All the post content except the header had disappeared, and I did not seem to be able to recover it. Whilst trying, I did receive an error once about the block format, indicating there was a bug with the block layout additions in WordPress. It is possible that there is also an issue with an existing plugin/plugin version that I am using.

In the end, I discovered a reasonable workaround. When editing the post to update it, click the triple dot menu in the top RHS of the right hand pane. Then select the code editor rather than the visual editor. This revealed all the existing content but in raw code mode.

When I then clicked on the Visual editor again, all of the content came back as originally posted.

I looked for solutions/workarounds online but could not find anything concrete. Whilst this is a nuisance, I can live with the workaround for now, until I can find the time to give more effort to a proper fix/solution.

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I was looking for a good way to do this immediately following the issues I hit changing the username domain on Office 365.

After experimenting with doing large zip downloads to back up locally, which was intermittent with large downloads, I found this post here and I did the following, do force all OneDrive files to be synched locally all the time:-

• I unlinked OneDrive by visiting Account under settings and clicking “unlink this PC”. I then visited the OneDrive local folder root, which was under c:\Users\SteveW\OneDrive (for my free hotmail OneDrive) and  “c:\Users\SteveW\OneDrive – Salient Soft” for my Office 365 business account, and moved them along with all the files, to the correspponding directory on the D Drive. I then visited One Drive again in the system tray and re-added the account/username, picking the link to browse for a different folder, and browsed for the new folder. When I did this it warned that files were already present, which was fine as I had just moved them, so I told it to continue. This allowed me to move from the default drive to my preferred non-system drive which had more disk space.
• I again visited OneDrive in the system tray, and opened Settings, then selected Sync and backup on the left menu, and picked advanced settings
• I then visited Files on-demand (noting the help link which is the above post), and selected “Download all files”. Once I allowed this to synchronise fully, after a few hours, all the files were downloaded locally.
• I then just needed to do local backups as normal, as my local copies of the cloud would be fully up to date.

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As I was no longer trading via a limited company, I wanted to remove the “Ltd” references to my organisation and URLs in Office 365.

One key point was that the login username was SteveWoodley@SalientSoftLtd.onmicrosoft.com, and I wanted to remove the Ltd. Office 365 support advised on this and I did the following:

• I added a new domain as above without the Ltd. To do this, I visited the admin centre, clicked “Show All” on the left menu, and then dropped down the settings menu, again on the left. I added the new domain, and also clicked the button to make it the fallback domain.
• I then selected users under the active users menu, selected my user, and then clicked the link for “manage username and email”. I then clicked the pencil to edit the primary username and email, and selected the new domain that I had just entered above.
• I did this again for all the usernames.
• I noted that when I visited onedrive, the URL root showed as “https://salientsoftltd-my.sharepoint.com/”, i.e. it still had the “Ltd” in it. After searching online, this post here states that you cannot change this as it is the tenant domain name. It would mean creating a new tenant/Office 365 subscription and moving all the data, settings etc. from the old to the new. As this was not a big deal, and as the support staff did not see this as a problem, I left it alone, and was happy that at least the username was corrected.

After this was done, I found that onedrive could not see all the files and was concerned about lost files. I did note that under the user settings, there is a OneDrive menu which allows you to create a link. This in fact created a working link, but the main OneDrive link from the admin etc. continued not to work.

Support advised just waiting a day to allow the changes to be resynchronised correctly at the server end. I did this, and it did indeed work out fine with everything working.

I had also initially had issues with OneDrive for Windows 11 immediately after the change, regarding use of the modified username/domain, and could not see the files. Again, this all sorted itself out after a day or so and everything was fine.

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We have had this issue a number of times, where the cover keyboard just won’t work, even after rebooting several times.

This appears to be a common problem which is griped about online, and the solutions are varied, not that clear/consistent, and do not always work. I even replaced the cover keyboard, which did fix the problem at the time, but I then later found that the original one still worked!

IMO this looks like some kind of underlying bios problem.

After trying a number of ideas which did not work, including removing the keyboard driver, and disabling/re-enabling the keyboard in the UEFI bios, I found that booting into the UEFI bios (hold +volume button whilst pressing on button), and then rebooting again, seemed to work.

This site here appeared to have some helpful ideas, including running the keyboard troubleshooter, which I had not seen previously. As the troubleshooter initially said that there were no problems (!), I had to run additional troubleshooters and then select keyboard, as per the post, for it to work. In my case, the troubleshooter ran fine, but the keyboard was already working, so I’ll have to wait until next time to see if this helps to solve the problem, should it occur again.

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I was using Spring Data JPA with Oracle as part of an export process from CouchDB to Oracle. The CouchDB export application first exports my existing Places data from CouchDB, then maps it to the entity model I am using for JPA/Oracle, then persists it into Oracle, and finally performs some rudimentary listing of the Oracle data by logging it.

Some issues/points came to light during this excercise which I am noting here:-

1/ My connect string to Oracle was using a Pluggable database in Oracle XE. This needs to use a service name (xepdb1) rather than a SID (xe) for the connection. To do this I needed to use a slash before the service name in the application properties, to indicate a service name, rather than the colon I would normally use for a SID:

# Oracle settings
spring.datasource.url = jdbc:oracle:thin:@localhost:1521/xepdb1
spring.datasource.username = places
spring.datasource.password = xxxxxxxx

2/ I changed the Hibernate naming strategy in the application properties to prevent unwanted snake casing of Oracle column names:

# Hibernate settings
spring.jpa.hibernate.naming.physical-strategy = org.hibernate.boot.model.naming.PhysicalNamingStrategyStandardImpl

3/ For persisting to Oracle, I had the choice of using Spring Data JPA, calling save() or saveAll() on the Individual Repository interfaces that extended CrudRepository (such as PlacesRepository), or I could use the Entity Manager. The Spring Data methods would persist or update fine, and could also save an iterable in one call. However, I had some small additional logic as I was passing and returning a Map. As I chose not to put this logic in the service layer, I therefore used an ordinary JPA Dao (repository) class, and autowired the entity manager via the @PersistenceContext annotation. I could therefore incorporate my logic in a single call and use entityManager.merge() to persist. I felt that situations vary and that it was not always appropriate to use Spring Data Interfaces for some use cases. However the Spring Data find queries were useful and clever for querying the database as they allowed for example a find by key with a like, and order by, just by declaring the appropriate method calls in the interface. I also used the @Query annotation for a custom query, which again was just annotated on a method in the interface.

4/ I had issues whereby the foreign keys on dependant entities were not being auto populated and threw up as null, even when I set nullable=false on the @JoinColumn annotations. In the end it was a simple case of not populating the objects in my model on both sides of the join before persisting – i.e. I was populating a list in a parent object for a one-to-many, but not populating the parent in the dependant object. Doing this resolved the problem and everything persisted automatically with a single parent persist/merge, with hibernate allocating primary keys via Oracle sequences, and then auto populating them in the foreign keys. This stack overflow post here pointed me in the right direction on this. I kept the nullable=false annotations where appropriate to correctly match the relationship I was using, and what was in Oracle.

5/ Once I was at the point of listing everything I had persisted, using Spring Data queries and some simple logging, I was initially hit with Hibernate multiple bag fetch exceptions when listing the data. At this stage I had annotated my repository methods as @Transactional rather than the service layer, and was therefore using explicit eager loading annotations as I needed everything to load before the methods returned. This post here details the issue, and it appears that Hibernate can only eagerly load one collection at a time. My solution to this was to take the more normal route of annotating my service methods as @Transactional rather than the repository, which then allowed a number of repository calls to be made from a single service method, all in the same transaction. Whilst this did expose the service layer to the transaction architecture and javax.transaction package, it is the more normal approach and gives flexibility in the service layer. In my case I could then just revert to the default lazy loading and perform the logging in the same service layer method (which I was happy to do as this was a very basic example just to demonstrate fetching the imported data from Oracle). Everything then worked fine.

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I just installed the latest 21c version of XE, and having created the system user, I connected to this via SQL developer, using XE as the SID. All fine so far.

When I then went to create a new schema via the CREATE USER command, I received ORA-65096: invalid common user or role name. Upon researching this I found that Oracle now uses a hierarchy of pluggable databases or PDBs inside a container database or CDB. Schemas aka users can then sit inside a PDB as normal. Inside the CDB, where I was logged in, the rules are different and common users are required which have their own rules and naming conventions.

I just wanted a simple local develpment solution for JPA use, so did not especially want to learn all the ins and outs of this. I found that an XE installation creates a default PDB called XEPDB1, and managed to create an SQL developer connection to this using the already created system account. I tried using XEPDB1 as the SID rather than XE, but this failed as invalid. However when I tried XEPDB1 as a service name rather than a SID it all worked fine. I did not need to make any other changes to the connection settings – user (system), password, and port (1521) were identical.

Having then connected via this new connection, I was successfully able to create a new schema in the default PDB. As expected, to connect to this new schema I again had to use the service name of XEPDB1 and I was able to connect, once I had granted the CREATE SESSION privilege to the new user after creating it to allow me to log on. I could then proceed to grant the necessary privileges to the user and create/populate tables etc. Initially, in addition to granting CREATE SESSION, I just simply granted UNLIMITED TABLESPACE to allow the schema user to allow tables to be populated. With this I was successfully able to perform inserts, upates, deletes, and selects on all the tables present.

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I had trouble opening an old presentation which used the Futura font – I wanted to reuse the theme and layout for a new presentation. The presentation opened in read only mode but refused to save or edit without removing this font which it had embedded. I mistakenly thought this font came with an older version of office, but having reinstalled an older version on an old PC and searching around I found this was not the case. I also tried Mutools to extract the fonts from an old PDF saved from the presentation, but this failed with an indirection error.

In the end I recalled that I actually installed this from Coreldraw 3, which comes with a clipart CD containing a large number of fonts and clipart pieces – the above font was one of them. I used Coreldraw to create the original Salient Soft logo, which was originally used for my previous company, Digital Agility, and then kept and reused for the new company. Sadly I was unable to locate my original CDs for Coreldraw – they would not be compatible with the latest windows, but the clipart CD would have been useful.

Fortunately, I searched around and found I had archived all the font TTF files with the letterhead/logo files in a Salient Soft forms directory. Installing them in Windows 11 was trivial – I just selected them all, right clicked, and picked install for all users. My presentation then opened, except for a second font, AmerType DB. However, I had not actually used this font, so was able to strip it out and save a new copy of the presentation which was editable, to allow getting the theme and layout.

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The title says it all. This really shouldn’t be hard, but I searched a number of forums full of gripes from people with no answers, and even on a microsoft forum, a microsoft reply said basically “sorry you can’t do that”. I felt this was particularly poor misinformation given that as below, I persevered with looking further and found a perfectly good solution that does it easily.

This post here was a start – you can do a “file/save as” of a a presentation, and select “powerpoint show” i.e. PPSX file (there is also a macro-enabled show file but did not need to try that). This looked promising as it did start the show when clicked on as a local file, but still did not actually start the show when shared via a hyperlink.

Later I found this post here which gave a clue to the issue and tried just adding a query string parameter “action=embedview” to the link URL. This worked perfectly in exactly the way I wanted – the show started automatically via the embedded viewer but still showed in a browser tab. If you want full screen you can use f11 as normal to toggle it in the browser. I didn’t care for having a link which directly took you into full screen powerpoint showing, as this takes control away from those who might be unaware of what is going on. There is an ‘open in new window’ icon at the bottom right, and this does open the presentation in a new tab without showing it, but this is fine, if someone wants to play with it they can. It also means they can save a copy themselves, but I was happy with this as they are viewing it all anyway, and if it was a web page they could export to PDF so not much different.

One key point on this is that it only worked when the file was hosted on my company MS onedrive share which actually had the office licence. It did not work on a Zen hosted file (it just downloaded it), and when I tried on a free MS onedrive share, it opened the presentation without running it directly, even when the above query string parameter was added. I am not sure of the reason for this, and may look into this further at some point, but it was not an issue anyway – I just needed to host the file on the correct share, and create a read only onedrive hyperlink with onedrive, and then add the query string parameter to the url, and it all worked fine.

This meant I could easily prepare simple powerpoint presentations to share for viewing, more easily than trying to put web pages together to do a similar thing – after all, the kind of presentation I wanted is exactly what powerpoint is for, and it does it easily. It was just a shame that the solution does not appear to be documented well online, but I was thankful for a good solution in the end.

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