Last week I initiated a series called ‘Hype v/s Reality’. Earlier I had started another series called ‘Learning from (others’) mistakes’. Today I am initiating another one called ‘Hidden Opportunities’. These are not series in the traditional sense. Traditional series appear regularly in consecutive issues. In case of the series mentioned above, they will appear sporadically and not in any particular order. For example, in a particular week, Tech Forum may contain one snippet of ‘Hype v/s Reality’ and another of ‘Learning from others’ mistakes’. As you know, the purpose of Tech Forum is to stimulate innovation, impart highly usable knowledge and broaden the horizons of IT as an industry by capitalising upon technology-based value addition. These series are some of the tools I will use to achieve these goals.

Hidden opportunities are areas of technology that are not often known but are nevertheless very useful. Due to lack of awareness, some of the greatest functionality provided by various technologies is simply not used. If you do use them, you are actually opening up many hitherto untapped opportunities. In a business context, opportunity means a potential sale. In case of technology, the opportunities by themselves may not be directly linked to increased sales. By knowing about these hidden treasures, you can achieve one or more of the following, each of which will definitely translate into more revenue ultimately:

1. Better utilisation of available features, leading to reduced coding.
2. Ability to offer more functionality and features to the end customer.
3. Evolution of a more efficient solution architecture.
4. Improved reuse.
5. Elimination of coding in some cases (where you had written code to achieve something that was already available but not known to you).

It is not ‘Undocumented <something>’
Please do not mistake ‘hidden opportunities’ with something like ‘Undocumented VB.NET’ or any similar series of books and sites. In fact, whatever I highlight in ‘hidden opportunities’ is very much documented even today. It has always been documented and yet hardly anyone knows about it; or very few people end up using it; or even fewer people end up using it the right way.

Another issue needs explanation here. Most documentation and content available about a particular technology focuses on the syntax level usage and explanation. However, how to use a feature in a real-life scenario is simply left to the imagination of the software architect (who?!!). Due to this, it is not enough to just know that a feature exists, it is much more important to have the ability to map it to some business scenario or need. Unfortunately, this education is not provided anywhere. Most training programmes, books, seminars, events and Web content take routine, mundane examples and do not delve on how and why a particular feature was used the way it was. In the Hidden Opportunities series, I will show useful examples of feature usage mapping to business needs. So much for an introduction. Now let us actually explore some hidden opportunities.

Split function in VB
Technical explanation
Let us start with something small but useful. It is just a nice little function in VB (and VBscript).

 Function Split(
   ByVal Expression As String,
   Optional ByVal Delimiter As String = “ “,
   Optional ByVal Limit As Integer = -1,
   Optional ByVal Compare As CompareMethod = CompareMethod.Binary
   ) As String()

The function is simple. Give it a delimited string and it will return an array containing individual strings. The delimiter is user definable - default is SPACE - chr(32).

Dim arrsubstring() As String = Split(“one two three”) 

The arrsubstring will now contain three elements containing “one” “two” and “three” as separate elements.
Of course, there is a reverse function called JOIN, which when passed an array and a delimiter, returns a string combined with the delimiter.

In .NET too there is a similar function. This time you can pass multiple delimiters as an array.

Using the function effectively
While searching through the MSDN library, I found this (PSS ID Number: Q266289). It is very revealing and reinforces my thinking that every feature needs to be used in the right context: “This article illustrates how to use the Split function to separate a delimited string into a string array. Although the Microsoft Visual Basic product documentation describes how to use the Split function, the product documentation does not contain an example that uses the Split function.”

Funnily enough, this article in MSDN goes on to give an example of a string that is delimited by ampersand (&). The string used is

strTest = “Fred & Wilma & Barney & Betty”

A simple illustrative example exists in .NET documentation also.

Now, from a usage perspective, just think of some scenario you know where you have to split a string (with a known delimiter) into pieces. You don’t even need to think—all of us have used (or are still using, although we may not like to admit it) comma delimited files. Does that ring a bell? Do you not need to parse a comma or tab delimited file and put it into a cursor / a recordset or upload it to some table in some database? The answer is very much yes. Now the question is: How many times have you used the SPLIT function to do CSV parsing? The answer is very rarely yes. Is it not a pity? The pitiful situation does not end here. Here is how a typical developer would parse the CSV file. Given below is the pseudocode:

1. Open file.
2. Read each line as string.
3. Count the number of delimiters.
4. Declare an array containing required no of empty elements.
5. Start a loop from 1 to length of the string.
6. Initialise an empty variable to accumulate the substring.
7. Check if each character is the delimiter (comma in this case).
8. If yes, put the accumulated substring in the next available element in the array.
9. If not, add the character to the variable.
10. Continue the loop till the end of the base string.

This means at least 10 lines of code (more, actually). Don’t believe that such things happen? Check out the code written within your organisation which does this type of parsing and you will be surprised (or depressed!). The SPLIT function existed for years without usage! Sounds familiar? On many occasions in Tech Forum I have been highlighting such ironic and paradoxical situations that exist in technology utilisation. The purpose is to make IT professionals aware that there is so much they are not aware of (a diplomatic way of saying that they are ignorant about; and sadly, completely comfortable with this ignorance).

Now next time you need to parse strings, think of SPLIT. Actually, I feel like making an ad:

I wonder how the developer within Microsoft who thought of and implemented this function would be feeling!

Continued ...

You may think that this is going into too much of the nitty-gritty of development, and harping on faults. But look at it this way. Combine all the commands and functions in Visual Studio / .NET platform / database level SQL languages and you have a mammoth but unfortunately hidden potential. Next week I will highlight a non-syntax based example. This example will show how potential that exists to achieve phenomenal functionality is often completely ignored—not because of lack of simple thinking.

Feedback
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About the Author Dr Nitin Paranjape is the Chairman and MD of Maestros (Mediline). He is a consultant with many organisations, covering appropriate technology utilisation, business application of relevant technology, application architecture and audit as well as knowledge transfer. He has authored more than 650 articles on various technology-related subjects. He can be contacted at nitin@mediline.co.in