Drawing a chart over a sum of two columns in Dynamics CRM - charts

I'd like to draw a line chart based on two columns - let's call the regarded fields cats and dogs. I know I could create a third field called animals and populate it but that seems to me as an ugly workaround.
I'm pretty sure there's no way to achieve that via the GUI so I'm hoping that editing the produced XML will open that possibility. As far I could understand this discussion, it's not possible but since it's old, I'm hoping that it's become possible since then.
Any luck on this one?

It's a bit unclear exactly what you are going for with this question. This is an excellent blog on how to modify your chart's fetchxml to extend the crm chart capabilities (and it may or may not answer your question depending on exactly what you mean by "draw a line based on two columns"): https://crmchartguy.wordpress.com/2015/06/21/compare-this-year-to-last-year-with-a-dynamics-crm-chart/

Related

R/exams: Open-ended questions with exams2moodle

My goal is to create a question using R/exams and Moodle including a few plots generated in the Rmd exercise file. The students should describe the plots verbally and then the exercise is graded manually.
Is it possible to use exams2moodle to create such an open-ended free text question for Moodle? There is no extype for it. In the documentation the only hint is:
"In order to generate free text questions in moodle one may specify extra parameters via \exextra. Currently the following options are supported:".
I have tried to add \exextra parameters to the metainformation, but it did not change anything.
A worked example can be found in the essayreg exercise shipped within the package, see: http://www.R-exams.org/templates/essayreg/
And you are right that this is not very well documented. The reason is that we have used somewhat different exextra tags for the Moodle export and for the QTI 2.1 export. We habe to improve and unify that in one of the next R/exams versions.
Also, another pointer, in case this is useful to anyone reading the question: Another useful strategy for asking about the interpretation of (statistical) graphics is in multiple-choice format. Let the participants judge some statements about the graphic that can either be approximately correct or clearly wrong. Of course, with open-ended question you can catch more nuances but with multiple-choice questions you can automatically assess a much larger number of participants. Or participants can self-assess in practice quizzes etc. Examples for this are the boxplots and scatterplot exercises:
http://www.R-exams.org/templates/boxplots/
http://www.R-exams.org/templates/scatterplot/

Make a Class Schedule Report

How can I make my Crystal Report look like the attached image? I have had no success creating it with a crosstab.
The short answer is that Crystal Reports isn't really equipped to handle the format you're dealing with. And here's why:
Let's assume for a moment you've already figured out how to interpret your query into something usable. Since we aren't using a Cross Table, the best you could hope for would be setting a Details section for each individual time slot and arranging a large number of formulas into a grid shape:
The problem is that every Formula would need to be unique; interpreting whether there is a Class at that Time and Date, and which Class it is. There would be up to 168 of those formulas and you'd have to manually go in and modify each one to check for their own unique combination of Date and Time. Which defeats the whole purpose of using a computer - to make repeated tasks easier.
Plus you'll have difficulty with the formatting: You'd need to program every "cell" to use a unique set of colors based on the displayed Class. That part is technically doable, but there's no way to "merge the cells" when classes last longer than a half hour. You'd end up with something like this:
So don't torture yourself trying to make this happen in Crystal. Even with all the time and effort it would take to formulate the grid, there's no good way to make it look like your screenshot.
That said, it looks as though you managed to put a schedule together in Excel. Is there any reason you can't use Excel instead? It's a much more powerful tool, and a cursory Google search suggests it can handle queries as well.

Dynamic data range references for charts

I have an OpenOffice Calc spread sheet that I'm using to track some data. I have three charts made from the data. I periodically add more data to the spreadsheet. My current way to propagate this to the chart is to alter the data ranges manually of each chart. I'd like to automate this, or at least not have to redundantly change each chart separately.
My current idea was to do something like $A$1:$A{$F$1} for the ranges where $F$1 holds the current last line. Unfortunately, OpenOffice doesn't recognize this, but I thought there might be a function or work around for it. I haven't been able to find one yet.
So, is there a way to execute my idea, or perhaps a better way to do it?
There is a very similar question to this, but the asker asked for many more features and the answer was to use something other than a spreadsheet. It was never answered whether this specific feature was possible.
Also:
First method is to extend the range of the graph way down, with lots of empty space.
Second method is to include only one extra line of data in the graph and when you add data, always insert it above that line.

Core Data Structure - avoiding circular reference?

I just wanted to validate my data structure.
It seems a bit convoluted to me, maybe it can be simplified?
Questions are grouped into chapters.
For each question, only one answer per session is possible.
The purpose is to be able to compare / analyze answers to the same questions (by different users or by the same users at different times, i.e. with different sessions).
A template, being a collection of chapters & questions, should not have to be replicated, if chapters and questions are the same.
(That would be necessary if Answer did not have a relationship to Session.)
Is the relationship from Answer back to Session the right strategy?
What else would you improve to simplify the model?
Thank you!
EDIT
Follow-up clarification:
The Answer is not static (e.g. "right" answer, "solution"), but some text the user inputs. It is more like a "questionnaire" than a "quiz". The answer has quantitative attributes that can be analyzed.
As stated, one question can have only one answer within a session. Because questions can indirectly belong to more than one session (via (NSSet*) question.chapter.template.sessions), they could have more than one answers and thus need a to-many relationship.
The typical scenario: User starts a new session with a certain template and fills out the answers. Then he can look at the analysis of the results and compare those with the results of other sessions that use the same template.
EDIT 2
The snapshot of the data model including attributes
honestly, this is what I would do instead of your structure, but I don't know what the purpose of the each entity because I'm not able to find out from their simple names.
this is just an idea to resolve the loop.
you can still reach all templates and all answers from the session, not directly but it does not make your life much harder.
UPDATE:
at the first and second sight, for me, it seems the Session entity is just an extra entity only here. honestly you would not need it, if you concatenate with the Template (aka Questionnaire) entity.
you have to add a many-to-many relationship between the Template and User (you can do it, don't worry about it). using this way, from each template you can reach all answers as well, and you won't have any loop.
Despite the really helpful effort by the part of #holex - the best way still seems to be to stick with my design. The simplifications I had hoped for have not materialized.

Multiple Models

I like knockoutjs, the sooner we get rid of coding directly toward the DOM the better. I'm having trouble understanding how I would do something which I'm going to explain in terms of a question/answer site. (This is probably a general MVC/MVVM question)
In my data model I have a question[id, description] and answer[id, question_id, text]. The browser requests a list of questions which is bound to a tbody, one column will display the question description, while the other should be bound to an answer textbox.
One obvious way of doing this is to have a QuestionAnswer[question_id, answer_id, question_descrition, answer_text] model. Ideally I'd like to keep them separate to minimize transformation when sending/receiving/storing, if there isn't some way of keeping them separate then I have the following question:
Where is the ideal place to create the QuestionAnswer model ? My bet is that by convention its created on the server.
If there is such an example somewhere please point me to it, otherwise I think it would make a good example.
Please help me wrap my head around this, Thanks!
What you could do is to create the combined model on the server, serialize it to json and then use the mapping plugin to add the serialized list to the view model.
I'm doing that here only it isn't a combined model, but shouldn't make any difference. Especially since it seems like your relation is one-to-one.
If you need to create an "object" in your view model, you can use the mapping definition to do so, like I do here.
I use C# to build my model on the server, but I guess you can use whatever you are comfortable with.
The cool thing with the mapping plugin is that it adds the data to the view model so that you can focus on behaviour.
Ok,
I'v gathered my thoughts on what my question is actually asking.
To do data binding on the client side you obviously need your data model there as well. I was conflicted on what I needed to send over and at what time.
To continue with the Question/Answer site idea: Sending down a list of answers each of which have a question in them is what should be done. That way you can bind to the answer list and simply bind the question description of each answer to the first table column.
If later I want to make a question editor I would potentially send a complete different data structure down and not reuse the Answer has a Question structure previously used.
I thought there might be a way of sending down a more complex data structure that references itself. Which apparently is possible in JSon with some extra libraries.