Stopwords to Live By

I'm doing some work with SQL Full-Text Search, and I'd forgotten how to display the list of "stopwords" that are currently being ignored when performing a search.

Below is a simple query to get the list of English stopwords on your database. Mine currently includes 154 items, including individual numbers and letters.

What's in your stopwords list?

 SELECT ssw.stopword, slg.name   
 FROM sys.fulltext_system_stopwords AS ssw  
   JOIN sys.fulltext_languages AS slg ON slg.lcid = ssw.language_id  
 WHERE name = 'English'  

RESTful Web.API Services Are So Primitive, Man!

A couple quick and dirty tips from the trenches on how to validate primitive types that map to enums of collections (specifically a list). This has come in handy as I develop a new RESTful Web.API .

First up, Enum.TryParse is now supported by the .NET Framework 4.5. So we can now easily validate a  string to make sure it correctly maps to an existing enum value.

 MyEnum matchingEnumValue;  
 if (!Enum.TryParse(enumValueAsString, true, out matchingEnumValue))  
   throw new ArgumentException(enumValueAsString + " is not a valid enum value.");  

Next up, we want to pass in a delimited string of integer values (e.g. "1|2|3"), and parse that into a collection.

 List<int> integerInList;  
 try  
 {  
   integerInList = integersInString.Split('|').Select(int.Parse).ToList();  
 }  
 catch (Exception ex)  
 {  
   throw new ArgumentException("Could not parse list of integers. " + ex.Message);  
 }  
 if (integerInList == null || integerInList.Count == 0)  
   throw new ArgumentException("Integer list is empty.");  

Easy as bullseye'ing womp rats in my T-16 back home. Share & Enjoy!