I want to create an app based on the content of a .mdb file, I searched for libraries to do that in native but they all needed requirements, I want a way to read these files using native code(C++) only, so I could use the library in multiple platforms.
Thx,
Regards
The .mdb file format is specific to the Microsoft Access ("Jet") database engine, which is proprietary and specific to Windows. (Furthermore, it is an evolving file-format, although it does not seem to continue to be in active development now.) There is one, and only one, "correct" way to use it, and that is: to use Microsoft's library and surrounding framework, on Microsoft's operating system.
If, indeed, you need to use a "file-based SQL engine," "on multiple platforms," then I would cordially suggest that you instead use a database file format that was specifically designed for such purposes: SQLite.
Mind you, the two are not the same. They're the product of two entirely different design teams who had different purposes in mind. The SQLite team knowingly did not adhere strictly to the SQL standard. But, what they did do was to create a public domain(!) database engine, which uses a single file, and which was specifically designed to be cross-platform. Meanwhile, the Jet team designed their engine specifically, and solely, in support of the Access (and Excel) products of their company.
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I've been tasked with porting personal face recognition software to iOS and Mac OS X as well as helping keep the basic SDK and much of the software as cross-platform as possible. One of the things one of my associates and I want to do is store data on the user's face in an SQL database (probably SQLite). We would also like to allow users to put their data on iCloud so they don't have to train each of their devices separately to recognize them. What's bugging me is how to do both these tasks, and I'm confronted with enough choices to feel overwhelmed. (I am still new to some of the technologies involved.)
For implementing SQL, I could embed SQLite directly in my program and write code for it, or I could use Core Data and have it talk to SQLite for me. (The database is not meant to be shared, so this is OK. And SQL is not fun.) However Core Data is anything but portable (not to mention not intended for a model encoded as C++ objects), while writing directly for SQL would mean we could reuse more code on other platforms.
Things get messier when factoring in iCloud, which has something like five or six possible ways of integrating it with a program. The only method I have definitively ruled out so far is iCloud key-value storage. (At the very least, there's a good chance a user would get into trouble with the 1 MB limit, and it is clearly not intended for anything as complex as I'm dealing with.) Core Data can integrate with iCloud through UIManagedDocument or NSPersistentStore, but, again, that means less in the way of reusable code. I can use SQLite together with UIDocument or NSDocument, but what I am trying to do seems to be not quite what these objects were intended for. The files I am dealing with are essentially large preference files, not meant for end-users to interact with directly; UIDocument and NSDocument seem to be meant for user-viewable and -editable files. And then there are iCloud Drive and CloudKit, which are still in beta. (On the other hand, these two are due to be released fairly soon. Considering that iOS users tend to upgrade to the latest version of the system software quickly, arguments about using either of these based on how many devices they will be able to run on should quickly become weak and obsolete.)
Can anyone recommend which way is best suited for my purposes? Thanks in advance.
Aaron Solomon Adelman
First off, you don't want to try and share the SQLite file directly. That's extremely likely to corrupt the file, because SQLite wasn't built with that kind of use in mind.
However:
You could use SQLite for local on-device storage only and use a separate API to send data back and forth. Apple's CloudKit would probably be a good choice if you can require iOS 8+. Numerous third party solutions exist (for example, Parse). You'll have to write your own code to translate between SQLite and the network API. Your SQLite schema and your data files would be portable to other platforms, and maybe some of the code if you use SQLite's direct API instead of an Objective-C wrapper (and I highly recommend using either FMDB or PLDatabase if you use SQLite).
Core Data does have built-in support for iCloud, which probably makes it a viable option. Your comment that "...I could use Core Data and have it talk to SQLite for me." suggests you might have somewhat misunderstood Core Data. Core Data is not a SQLite wrapper; it presents a completely different API, and uses its own schema. You can't really take a Core Data persistent store file and use it on other platforms unless you want to spend some time reverse-engineering the schema. Also, using Core Data with iCloud does not require the use of UIManagedDocument, though it does still require a lot of other Core Data-specific classes.
If you want to be able to sync data across multiple devices which are not all Apple devices then you need a third party API. None of Apple's cloud APIs will be useful here. There are many providers that can help out with this. For local data storage, either SQLite or Core Data would work, but you should look at the third party services and see what storage option(s) they support, then try to work with them.
The best approach depends on your needs. If you expect to copy data files from an iOS app to other platforms, SQLite is good. You'll still have a lot of platform-specific code, the savings there are much less. If you don't plan to move data files around like that, Core Data is probably easier to deal with.
The computer has already been installed ORACLE. But I didn't try ORACLE before, I just use sqlite...So, for now I want to create a database locally, and just insert one table. I want to use a test C++ program to read and write in this database. Is there something useful for using API about this? BTW, in the computer I saw SQL plus and SQL developer, but I didn't find the DBCA, which I know can be used to create table...help me, thanks a lot!!
BTW, my supervisor wants to me to test different kinds of database, which will be written in my report. So I want to test different kinds of databases, for the data is quite small, just 100 lines in a table is enough, but it will be applied in a big program, so I need to try different kinds of database locally, and not difficult for me to use C++ API...Because I just know little about database. I need some suggestions, thank a lot!
While I wouldn't recommend Oracle for handling small data sets, I do have a pointer to C++ API documentation.
http://www.oracle.com/pls/db112/portal.portal_db?selected=5&frame=
... and scroll to the bottom of the page for links to further information.
There's a choice of either using C++ with Oracle OCI API, or using C++ with Oracle Pro*C precompiler. The precompiler actually does produce code that uses the OCI API.
I have done some work with the Pro*C precompiler (using C as the implementation language, though, not C++), and it wasn't too bad. OCI tends to be quite low-level, but apparently writing direct OCI code has its uses, too.
We are storing allot of time series data into our own proprietary "database". In the next version of our system we want to give our users a simple query mechanism to extract the raw data from the database (as a complement to the reports our system can create) by using standard tools.
I have looked at the possibility to write an ODBC driver, but it looks like quite a daunting task, especially when the use will be very simple select statements.
I would be grateful for any tips, ideas and/or recommendation of libraries, that could make this task a bit simpler.
Our platform is Windows and our dev. env. is visual studio 2010 (nativ C++)
A LINQ provider.
It depends on what makes your customers happy. Easier than an writing ODBC driver would seem to provide a library function that can parse simple SQL selects and deliver the result in whatever form desired.
It might be interesting to take a look at OData, exposing your data as an OData producer, you would then be able to allow your users to query it right away using the already available consumers, e.g. Linqpad.
I'm trying to find open source applications using PostgreSQL that are written in C/C++ so I can study them. A few open source projects using PostgreSQL are Evergreen ILS, SpamAssassin, and pgpool. However, Evergreen and SpamAssassin are written in Perl, and pgpool (written in C) is a replication tool, not a typical application. Moreover, I looked at the SQL code in Evergreen, and it is quite voluminous and complicated.
Hence, I'm looking for one or more applications using PostgreSQL, preferably those that are somewhat trivial (but not too trivial).
seen libpqxx? try asking on its mailing list (but scour their wiki first)
http://pqxx.org/development/libpqxx
pgAdmin is written using c++ using wxwidgets.
how about pgAdmin 3 ?
Also, you may find Qt4 a very easy way interact with databases programming in C++.
http://doc.trolltech.com/4.6-snapshot/sql-programming.html
Have you searched through the projects at http://pgfoundry.org ?
Two examples that are open-source:
Kexi (see kexi-project.org)
FOST4 (
http://support.felspar.com/Fost%204 )
It's pretty big, but the KDE Project's Amarok is written in C++ and can use a PgSQL backend (among several others). While it's pretty large, you may be able to find some interesting things in the database code. Since it uses a pre-defined schema (as opposed to the extremely general types of access that something like pgAdmin uses) it may have some good things to teach you. It will definitely be easier to pick apart than Evergreen, which actually has an entire middleware layer that actually does the data access through exposed services (The OpenSRF Project).
What solutions are there? I know only solutions for replacing Bookmarks in Word (.doc) files with Apache POI?
Are there also possibilities to change images, layouts, text-styles in .doc and .ppt documents?
I think about replacement of areas in Word and PowerPoint documents for bulk processing.
Platform: MS-Office 2003
What are your platform limitations?
Obviously Apache POI will get you at least part of the way there.
Microsoft's own COM API's are fairly powerful and are documented here. I would recommend using them if a) you are not running in a server (many users, multithreaded) environment; b) you can have a proper version of powerpoint installed on the production machine; and c) you can code against a COM object model.
It's a bit pricey, but Aspose.Slides is a very powerful library for manipulating PowerPoint files
If you include using other Office suits as an option, here's a list of possible solutions:
Apache POI-HSLF
PowerPoint 2007 APIs
OpenOffice.org UNO
Using POI you can't edit .pptx file format, but you don't depend on the apps installed on the system. Other two options, on the contrary, make use of other apps, but they are definitely better for dealing with presentations. OpenOffice has better compability with older formats, by the way. Also if you use UNO, you'll have a great choice of languages, UNO exists for Java, C++, Python and other languages.
My experience is not directly with Power Point, but I've actually rolled my own WordML (XML) generator. It a) removed all dependencies on Word, b) was very fast c) and let me build up documents from scratch.
But it was a lot of work to create. And I was only creating a write only implementation.
I'm not as familiar with Power Point, so this is conjecture, but you may be able to roll your own by reading XML (Power Point 2003??) and/or cracking the Office Open XML file (zipped XML), then using XPath to manipulate the data, and then saving everything back to disk.
This won't work on older OLE Compound Document based Power Point files though.
I've done something like that before: programmatically accessed and manipulated PowerPoint presentations. Back when I did it, it was all in C++ using COM, but similar principles apply to C#/VB .NET apps, since they do COM interop very easily.
What you're looking for is called the Office Document Model. Basically, Office applications expose their documents programmatically, as trees of objects that define their contents. These objects are accessible via an API, and you can manipulate them, add new ones, and do whatever other processing you want. It's exceedingly powerful; you can use it to manipulate pretty much all aspects of a document. But you'll need an installation of Office and Visual Studio to be able to use it.
Some links:
Intro: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/d58327k6.aspx
Hope this helps!
Apparently new users can only include one link per posting. How lame! :)
Here's the other link I meant to include:
Example of manipulating PowerPoint documents programmatically: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc668192.aspx