Another common gotcha that people are reporting is the categorisation of the blocks for the item 3 records (lowest level).

The download expects an alpha numeric code, which is actually a roman numeral classification of the ‘premise type’.

You need to ensure your blocks are assigned to a block category and that the block categories you use have the roman numeral code assigned to them.

The table below lists the codes.

Just a quick reminder to our clients doing the DFE condition download.

Iit is important that your element groups match those prescribed by the DFE.  This includes the reference number, which is entered in the element group code.  These codes are also unique, you cannot have 2 element groups sharing the same reference.

After reports from several clients that the validator for the DFE download provided by Tribal was throwing an error saying the date portion of the file format was invalid we thought we would take a closer look…

Turns out that the downloader still thinks it is 2005.  To get the validate to accept your file, simply replace the current year with 05 and it should accept the file.

So for the file in the screenshot below, renaming it to AMP894CON_160205.TXT will do the trick.

Following on from yesterdays news about the DFE download, we have some further advice.

We highly recommend that exported files (the .txt files which are emailed – not the excel export) are run through the DFE validator.

We have published this software on our Support Portal Library. The screenshot below should provide the necessary information to enable you to grab it.

When we found out that David Drew, a former user of Concerto’s software from Telford and Wrekin Council, was planning to take on a mammoth 300 mile charity bike ride from London to Paris we couldn’t help but feel inspired by the challenge he had set himself so it was an easy decision for us to sponsor him along his journey.

Our Asset Management clients will be aware that they can optionally submit their condition data to the DFE in the format previously defined in the DFE 2005 document Condition and Suitability Data.

As this has come to the forefront again, we have added this facility to Concerto Assets.  It is now available in the latest Concerto release. 

A usage guide and an instructional movie (published to the Concerto Gallery) are available on request.

We have recently increased the RAM on our UK Web Hosting Core 2 Quad Core Server. 

Though no issues had been raised with respect to the performance of this machine, this is a timely upgrade to continue to meet the performance expectations of our clients.

You’d of thought it was easy to view XML documents in a friendly format, what with it being a universal data standard and heavily promoted by the likes of Microsoft for the last 10 years (or something like that!).

But I always found it a bit of a struggle to get a decent free viewer which just let you view data in a human readable, tabulated format without having to provide a corresponding xslt document.

Well it turns out that Excel 2007 and 2010 provides support for this.  All you need to do is drag ‘n drop your well formed XML document into Excel and it will do the rest of the work for you.

In seconds you will have the Excel worksheet in front of you with nicely tabulated data.

Personally I have found it very useful for easily analysing SQL Server Profiler trace files, proof below;

We often get asked how to spell check input fields in Concerto.  By far the easiest way to achieve this is to use a browser plugin, compatible with your browser of choice.

There are many different plugins available and by all means try a few until you find one you like.

Internet Explorer

Try ieSpell, available here.

Firefox

For firefox, simply install an English dictionary and language pack, available here.

Chrome

Chrome has a built in spell checker. For more information click here.

Safari

Safari also has a built in spell checker, but to the best of my knowledge (as a non-mac person!) it is not turned on by default.  Review this article for information on how to enable it.

Note:In most instances you will need to discuss the installation of any plugins with your IT department.

This drove me mad for about 10 minutes …

Excel has a nice function called Lookup which allows you to set a cell value, based on another cell value, which appears in another list.

Having written the function, I found it was persistently returning incorrect values.

I had missed this little nugget from Microsoft’s own online help;

Important   The values in lookup_vector must be placed in ascending order: ...,-2, -1, 0, 1, 2, ..., A-Z, FALSE, TRUE; otherwise, LOOKUP might not return the correct value. Uppercase and lowercase text are equivalent.

So oddly, for Lookup to work, the lookup list has to be sorted in alphabetical order – wonder who programmed that one!