Connect to HP ALM via browser using REST API

Currently I am playing with the REST API of HP ALM and since some basics are always good before you start automating things, I first wanted to connect to ALM using a web browser.

Authentication

Open a browser and type in the following url, but replace the part {host} with the address to your HP ALM server.

https://{host}/qcbin/authentication-point/authenticate

This will display a simple login dialog, in which you provide your HP ALM user name and the corresponding password.

Last Updated: 03 January 2018

Hits: 25677

Reading big Excel files with POI

Hi there.

Recently I was sitting in a bad place again. I had to automate one process step in a workflow, which was entirely based on processing files of different type, layout and size.

I love automating things by developing software, but I hate doing so whenever it is based entirely on file systems.

To make matters worse, I had to process Excel files ... again! Being a very experienced VBA programmer, in which I do take shame, not pride, I knew it will give me trouble.

Since I do not want to code in VBA anymore, I decided to use Java and the Apache POI API.

Started to use the API and was happy. See the following articles for reference.

How to setup an eclipse project to use POI.

• Apache POI in Eclipse

Identifying the last row in Excel files can be hard. Depends on what you define as last row ;0).

• Find last row in Excel file using POI

A high level wrapper class around POI for processing Excel files.

• Reading and writing MS Excel files using POI

And here the problem ...

Last Updated: 27 January 2016

Hits: 17605

Split and Transpose Strings

Splitting Strings is a trivial task. Using SQL unfortunately it is not so easy to do. Recently I had to split long concatenated strings from one field in an Oracle database.

Luckily I was not the only one facing this challenge and found helpful information on the internet.

Below an example that did the trick for me.

 -- Splitting test strings --
WITH qry AS (
Select 'a,b,c' As tf From Dual
Union Select 'd,e,f' As tf From Dual 
Union Select 'g,h' As tf From Dual 
Union Select 'i' As tf From Dual
) 
SELECT regexp_substr(tf, '[^\,]+', 1, rn) Transposed_Field 
FROM qry 
cross join 
(
Select rownum rn from ( 
select max(regexp_count(tf, ',')) + 1 mx from qry) connect by level <= mx 
) 
Where regexp_substr(tf, '[^\,]+', 1, rn) is not null
Order By Transposed_Field;

The resultset of above query will look like the following picture.

Last Updated: 01 January 2018

Hits: 14312