If I understand correctly, if I'm attempting to aggregate activities in an aggregated feed group based on their calendar day, I necessarily do this relative to the UTC date. This unfortunately can yield confusing results if it's done somewhere like North America. Is it possible to aggregate on a date relative to a different time zone? Is there another way to achieve a similar result?
Currently it's not possible to provide an offset to the strftime function inside of an aggregation rule.
Without knowing all the specifics I think you may be able to achieve the desired result by adding a separate custom field such as local_date (e.g. with a string value of '2018-05-15'). This would be pre-computed and included with the Activity when it's added to a Stream feed, and referred to in the aggregation rule like {{ local_date }}.
The cavieat / limitation is that you'll need to decide whether to use the 'local date' from the perspective of a user who creates an activity (which may be different to the user reading a feed containing the activity), or a system-wide date that's applied across the application regardless of where your user's are located.
Related
I have worked on Azure Search service previously where I created an indexer directly on a SQL DB in the Azure Portal.
Now I have a use-case where I would want to ingest from multiple data sources each having different data schema. Assume these data sources to be 3 search APIs of X,Y,Z teams. All of them take search term and gives back results in their own schema. I want my Azure Search Service to be proxy for these so that I have one search API that a user can use to get results from multiple sources, ordered correctly.
How should I go about doing it? I assume that I might have to create a common schema and whenever user searches something, I would call these 3 APIs and get results, map them to a common schema and then index this data in common schema into Azure Search index. Finally, call this Azure Search API to give back the results to the caller.
I would appreciate any help! If I can get hold of a better documentation for doing this work, that will be great as well.
Your assumption is correct. You can work with 3 different indexes and fire queries against them, or you can try to combine all of them in the same index. The benefit of the second approach is a better way to implement ordering / paging as all the information will be stored in the same index.
It really depends on what you mean by ordered correctly. Should team X be able to see results from teams Y and Z? The only way you can get ranked results like this is to maintain a single index with a common schema containing data from all teams.
One potential pitfall with this approach is conflicts in the schema. For example if one team requires a field to be of a specific datatype or use a specific analyzer, while another team has different requirements. We do this in our indexes, but with some carefully selected common fields and then dedicated fields prefixed according to our own naming convention to avoid conflicts.
One thing to consider is the need to reset the index. If you need to add, change or remove fields you will have to delete the index and create it again with a new schema. If you have a common index and team X needs to add a new property, you would need to reset (delete and create) the common index which affects all teams.
So, creating separate indexes per team has its benefits. Each team can have their own schema without risk of conflicts and they can reset their index without affecting the other teams.
Is there a way to insert activities into a feed so they appear as if they were inserted at a specific time in the past? I had assumed that when adding items to a feed it would use the 'time' value to sort the results, even when propagated to other feeds following the initial feed, but it seems that's not the case and they just get sorted by the order they were added to the feed.
I'm working on a timeline view for our users, and I have a couple of reasons for wanting to insert activities at previous points in time:
1) We have a large number of entities in our database but a relatively small number of them will be followed (especially at first), so to be more efficient I had planned to only add activities for an entity once it had at least one follower. Once somebody follows it I would like to go back 14 days and insert activities for that entity as if they were created at the time they occurred, so the new follower would see them in their feed at the appropriate place. Currently they will just see a huge group of activities from the past at the top of their feed which is not useful.
2) Similarly, we already have certain following relationships within our database and at launch I would like to go back a certain amount of time and insert activities for all entities that already have followers so that the feed is immediately useful.
Is there any way to do this, or am I out of luck?
My feeds are a combination of flat and aggregated feeds - the main timeline for a user is aggregated, but most entity feeds are flat. All of my aggregation groups would be based on the time of the activity so ideally there would be a way to sort the final aggregation groups by time as well.
Feeds on Stream are sorted differently depending on their type:
Flat feeds are sorted based by activity time descending
Aggregated feeds and Notification feeds sort activity groups based on last-updated (activities inside groups are sorted by time descending)
This means that you can back-fill flat feeds but not aggregated feeds.
One possible way to get something similar to what you describe is to create follow relationship with copy_limit set to a low number so that only the most recent activities are propagated to followers.
I am currently working on a project in which I am trying to simplify the analysis of 12 reports, all of which are validated against one other report.
I am working with Power Query in order to format the reports so that they are more useful.
My issue is the sourcing, as the reports change every day and also that each report looks different, hence I need to load them separately and cannot load them in one go.
I have one folder in which the reports are loaded every day; unfortunately the names change and hence the query path changes / is lost. (e.g. RG0040_20180701 changes to RG0040_20180702.)
The first part of the name is always the same, but the date within the filename changes.
I could manually rename every report each day but this is not plausible nor efficient as I want to reduce the time taken across the whole process.
How can I resolve this issue?
My initial thoughts are perhaps some VBA that could tell the query to look for only the name (e.g. RG0040) as this is already a unique identifier to the report might be a possible solution.
I would suggest loading from the containing folder rather than the specific file and then filter down to pick the most recent file that matches your naming criterion.
If the reports don't have consistent structure, then automation will be much more difficult.
The scenario is that I have a Projects list and there are a bunch of different SPFieldUser fields associated to it. I have another list representing the Project's Logbook (it contains a bunch of data about different milestones of the project). The relationship is like this: (1 project list item : 1 logbook list).
I have to store some metadata in a logbook's list item that points to a specific user, stored in Project's list item. For that I have to create a choice field which represents different SPFieldUser fields from the project's list.
The question is which is optimal way of representing such a structure?
I can just hard-code a choice option for every SPFieldUser in a Projects list, but then when I have to reference this data in a code, I'll have to somehow transform the choice's value into internal name of the associated project's field.
I can also create a lookup of those fields and this way, accessing it is easy. I can show the Title to user and have the internal name stored in a lookup.
I was also thinking about defining some kind of custom FieldType, but I feel like it would require far more work than an of the other methods.
So which method do I choose? Can someone probably suggest a better way?
Lets check out your options one by one in terms of efforts and scalability.
1 Hardconding option : High efforts [Not at all recommended]
- Column needs to be updated when new user joins or user leaves the
company.
- Once format of data is specified its difficult to change. [e.g. FirstName+Lastname or Empid]
Highly recommended OOTB option : very low efforts
Configurable [Please check if you can change format of user data once added as lookup column.]
Custom column type will take coding efforts.
My recommendation is 2nd OOTB option. If you find some flaws in 2nd option let us know we can look for soultion.
I have following questions regarding Azure DocumentDB
According to this article, multiple functions have been added to
DocumentDB. Is there any way to get Date functions working? How can i
get the queries of type greater than some date working?
Is there any way to select top N results like 'Select top 10 * from users'?
According to Document playground , Order By will be supported in future. Is ther any other way around for now?
The application that I am developing requires certain number of results to be displayed that have been inserted recently. I need these functionalities within a stored procedure. The documents that I am storing in DocumentDB have a DateTime property. I require the above mentioned functionalities for my application to work. I have searched at documentation and samples. Please help if you know of any workaround.
Some thoughts/suggestions below:
Please take a look at this idea on how to store and query dates in DocumentDB (as epoch timestamps). http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2014/11/19/working-with-dates-in-azure-documentdb-4/
To get top N results, set FeedOptions.MaxItemCount and read only one page, i.e., call ExecuteNextAsync() once. See https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/microsoft.azure.documents.linq.documentqueryable.asdocumentquery.aspx for an example. We're planning to add TOP to the grammar to make this easier in the future.
You can email me at arramac at microsoft dot com to get early access to Order By right away. This is planned for broad release shortly.
Please note that stored procedures are best used when you have a write operation(s). You'll be able to better throughput on reads when you query directly.