I had to replace a DB table with embedded SQL in Crystal.
Now I find myself completely amazed that (apparently) I have to open thirty or more formulas one at a time and replace the table name with "Command"
If I select "All formulas" in the replace widget, all the replace controls are disabled.
This is so stupid that I figure I am missing something.
I am working the Crystal files directly in the Crystal IDE. Not able to fire up a C# or VB program to do it for me. I did try a couple of times in the past to edit things in Crystal files with regexp/perl/editors and similar, but that failed due to the Crystal file format.
(S.O. says my question "appears subjective and is likely to be closed." Huh?)
Transitioning from linked tables (Database 'expert') to a command (or the other direction) has always been painful (I've been using the product since v4)--CR doesn't have a good (or even mediocre) way to do this. You should be able to map your command to a single table, but you'll lose field (from the canvas) during the process (because CR will remove unmapped fields). Best practice is to always use a command or to wrap each table.field element in a formula field.
With earlier version of the product, I might have suggested using the SDK to make the change. However, this level of control has been shifted to BusinessObjects' RAS SDK.
If you are interested, have a look at my RptToXml project or its C# replacement.
Related
I am from Slovakia, I wouldn't be surprised if most of you haven't heard about it.
However, that causes me a troubles when it comes to reports. We need to have 3 (soon 4) language versions of each report: Slovak is main language, than, Polish and English.
Since pentaho does not support Polish nor Slovak, it is really pain for me to keep these localized.
What I do is:
Create report in Slovak language
Write down all phrases from report
Send phrases to one of our partners to translate
Create its copy in either pl/en directory
Open it in Report Designer and edit every phrase accordingly
Save as another language version
As you can imagine, the process is very time consuming, and error prone. Plus, every time I add new parameter to report or change its data source (which is BeanShell script), I need to do it in 3 separated files. As a result of this, language mutations are usually out of date, way behind main language version.
I have tried to automate it with OneSky and did a python script that does 2 stages:
Stage 1 (extract and upload):
Change *.prpt files sufix to *.zip
Extract phrases from files: ~/datadefinition.xml, ~/layout.xml, ~/styles.xml, ~/datasources/inline-ds.xml
Put those phrases into *.po file
Export *.po file into OneSky
Stage 2 (download and import):
Change *.prpt files sufix to *.zip
Download translated *.po file from OneSky
Run through ~/datadefinition.xml, ~/layout.xml, ~/styles.xml, ~/datasources/inline-ds.xml files and replace original phrases by translated
While this aproach works fine, it doe not translate everything. There are still flaws of this process. I need to go through it every time I do even slightest change in data source of report or fix small mistakes. Even if I just do a small six in SQL code, I need to do it in 3 files. That of course increases chance to mistake be made.
Soo, I was wondering, how are you guys solving this issue with translating of your reports?
I will share very simple method which we are following.
1)create a properties file with key value format for each language for resource labels(for static values)
2)put it into resources folder(report-designer/resources/)
3)Based on the parameter you can specify which properties file to select and you can specify keys into value field so that it can understand which value to display in which language.
4)if you need to convert the data which are coming from database,you have to design data warehouse specify all the mappings,accordingly it can fetch the data.
5)For converting dates and currency symbols or number format you can use inbuilt functions which can handle all this things,i am using mysql and mysql has translation functions which can handle all such things.
it is difficult to explain entire process here, but if you can get and idea from this it can be useful to you.
I work with a medium sized team of developers, with half being Linux developers using VIM on Ubuntu and MacVIM on OSX, and the other half being Windows developers using Visual Studio 2010 or later.
A fair bit of time has been wasted in the past when handling things like SVN operations failing due to mixed line endings, or changes to code reviews due to a mix of hard-tabs versus spaces-as-tabs (and sometimes of varying lengths, ie: 4 spaces vs 2 spaces vs 8 spaces, etc), and I would like to put an end to it.
The plan is to adapt a common coding style we've designed, which is almost identical to the Linux Kernel coding style. For all developers, we could require them to run their code through the checkpatch.pl script used by Linux kernel devs, but our code includes C, C++, and C#, so we would need to generalize the rule checker script beyond just ANSI C.
Is there a generic way to implement a rule set for VIM, and another for Visual studio? We'd like to generate a script that checks entire files, which could be hooked into our version control system so that it's run on code before commits complete, and perhaps as a run-time script to enforce the style as coders type?
Thank you.
EditorConfig seems to do exactly what you want in Vim, Visual Studio, and a lot of other editors and IDEs.
The run-time "script" is the best first-line of defense. In this case, it will be various Vim and Visual Studio settings to help enforce your code style. That alone will catch quite a few problems. Keep in mind, this won't catch everything, but will encourage the coding style you want.
I've worked across Linux & Visual Studio in a team before (and sometimes by myself). The whole Tabs/Spaces issue drove me nuts as there would be wholesale groups of lines that were either shifted WAY over or not enough. To solve this, I ended up using these three settings in Vim (also set similar values in Visual Studio), thus catching one class of issues at the root.
Vim
set expandtab
set shiftwidth=4 " Mainly for if/for/while/general {} block indentation. 4 spaces.
set softtabstop=-1 " Allows us to use the Tab key and have it act like shiftwidth.
Visual Studio
Insert spaces when Tab key is pressed.
Shift 4 spaces on indent inside code block
They key is getting rid of the Tab characters, or at least having both systems use the SAME SETTINGS (i.e. both using Tab with the same values or SPACEs substituting as Tabs)
Something to watch out for:
Someone copying a file from one Operating System to a different one and then checking the file into SVN on that machine. SVN will blindly commit, say, a DOS line-ending file from a UNIX system. You want to checkout/commit files on the same system only. Otherwise, checking out/editing/committing files all on the same OS should present no issues, as SVN can convert the line endings upon checkout. You can "fix" this by loading a file into Vim and then converting the line-endings to the particular OS you want by typing ":set fileformat=dos" (if you want to change to Windows-style), ":set fileformat=unix" (for unix style), or finally ":set fileformat=mac" for Mac.
As far as the code style goes, as you probably already know, both Vim and Visual Studio offer lots of flexibility there. While I cannot give you the specific settings for Vim, the options to look at are
autoindent
cindent
cinoptions (implied from cindent)
cinkeys (implied from cindent)
comments (default is probably fine, but here for thoroughness)
So, you will want
set autoindent
and cindent should be automatically set when editing a C or C++ file. The defaults for cinoptions and cinkeys are ok for me, but I have tweaked them in the past when working with a different group.
Don't forget about using the '=' command over a selected range of lines to reformat the code! This can be very handy!
I shy away from the completely automatic SVN backend method because it may take longer than you expect to get it right, and when it screws up, it will probably take more time out of your day than you expect as well. After all, you really just want to be productive, right?.
Discipline up front is key!
Okay SO. I need some guidance. I apologize for the length of this post, but I need to provide some details:
I've got someone who is interested in me to do a small project for them. The application in general is a fairly straightforward employee record keeping / documentation app, but it makes pretty heavy use templated Word and Lotus documents. The idea is you select the employee “event” such as commendation, promotion, discipline, etc., and it loads the appropriate template doc and you fill it in from there, and later you can select an employee, view all the “events,” and view the individual documents associated with each one.
Thus, the app must know where the .docs are saved when the user is done.
The client actually has a v1 of this app (it doesn’t do any management of the files or anything, just launches Word/Lotus with the document you wanted to view in a new instance, presumably via a system() call.) We’ve not gotten into a detailed requirements phase, but the client and I agree that for this to really work, some kind of control over where the user saves the .doc’s to is going to be critical , because otherwise the app provides them with the new copy of the template doc, they "Save as" somewhere else, and the app is pointing to the blank copy it provided them with.
Obviously, I can’t think of a way to achieve “Save as” restriction/control in any way via just launching a new instance of Word. The client has the idea of an embedded Word/Lotus instance in the app with the template doc when you choose one, but I’ve few reservations with that:
I’ve dug around online and I’ve read that whichever version of Word I borrow MSWORD.OLB from will be the one the end user would require?
I’ve tried to do the MSDN example of embedding a Word doc from here, but as I’ve come to get used to, the MSDN example doesn’t even compile.
Even if I CAN figure out how to embed a .doc file into their application, I don’t know that I could control the use of “Save as…”
All of this STILL hasn’t touched on Lotus (!)
So… instinctively, I feel the embedded Word/Lotus thing has to be more work than it’s worth in the end.
So I’ve had a few other ideas brewing around.
One is looking into using Office XML (and if there’s a lotus equivalent), and get the user’s “inputs” separately and generate the document on the fly each time. I’m not particularly thrilled with that idea, but I think it COULD work, provided I just use old features to try and stay far backwards compatible.
Get user’s “inputs” separately and generate a document in HTML. Meh. Works, very cross platform and easily parsed and understood, but not good if you want to be able to email it to someone (who emails a .html? Works, yes, very unconventional which to the average user will throw them off) and even worse if you need to email it to someone for revisions…
Perhaps some kind of editable PDF? I know there are PDF libraries out there, and the more I stew on it, the more this sounds like the best option, though I’ve not done much work with PDFs and I don’t know how easily embeddable they are / what options one has when creating them. I know they can be save-disabled, I’ve had that with my bloody state taxes before.
I need some input here. Here’s the TLDR questions:
Is launching a new instance of Word for each .doc as bad as I feel, given user can “Save as” document wherever and then application is left pointing to a blank document?
Is trying to support embedded Word as big of a trouble as I feel like it is / more work than it’s worth / likely to cause problems with supporting multiple versions of Word? (Forward compatibility as well as currently released versions?)
What are thoughts on the PDF plan?
Any other good ideas?
Word does allow for programming some "Save" and "Save As" control via its object model. Any subroutines coded in VBA and placed into your Word template will be copied into all documents generated from that template. Additionally, most menu and Ribbon commands can be intercepted by creating a module containing subroutines named for the intercepted commands. So, for example, if a module contains a sub named FileSaveAs(), any code in that sub will be executed instead of the standard File|Save As command. Lastly, this code will replace Save As commands executed via keystroke, toolbar, menu, or Ribbon.
The code below will launch a dialog box to a predetermined path whenever a "Save" or "Save As" command is executed:
Sub FileSave()
ControlSaveLocation
End Sub
Sub FileSaveAs()
ControlSaveLocation
End Sub
Sub ControlSaveLocation()
Dim Directory As String
Directory = "C:\Documents\"
With Application.Dialogs(wdDialogFileSaveAs)
.Name = Directory
.Show
End With
End Sub
Hope this helps.
how do we rename .xaml and .cs files?
would like to be able to keep development in synch with the original sketchflow. i.e. sketchflow has features such as the ability to collect client feedback on a per screen basis, etc.
... I kind of answered my own question here, so I'll post it as a follow up. Asked the original question 9 hours ago on the MS site without response... still trying to work out where the best place is to talk to the community, so sorry for the duplicate.
THE ANSWER (IS THERE A BETTER ONE?)
Context: Sketchflow is a prototyping tool. In large teams possibly you want to keep the prototype seperate from the finished version, or there's a large prototyping phase.
My view is that I really like Sketchflow. It's one of the coolest things I've seen for a while (well done Microsoft).
... so for me, I want the prototype to become a the finished product. I want the designers to step in and make transitions whenever they want. I want the designers to kick the process off, and the developers to put in the detail. I'd like our customers to be able to post feedback at any time during the build process. btw: get your developers to check out MVVM. It's very cool.
My bet is that the feedback could get lost if you make a breaking change (a file rename) -- so just beware of that. That wont be a problem for us. We'll get our file names to make sense and then mostly leave it alone. Of course MS could fix this this by creating a globally unique id (Guid) for each screen that is created. Perhaps they've done this already. If someone from MS reads this, please put this on your requested features list.
THE ANSWER:
So here is the answer that works for me:
don't try to hand-edit the xaml / cs, as all the cross referencing that you might be doing with behaviors will break if you aren't really careful. Typical files that need to be modified: .csproj, Sketch.Flow, xxxx.xaml, and xxxx.cs.
To auto do it, download a tool like Ultraedit. Alternatively, you might be able to just use VS 2010 (untested).
Steps with ultraedit:
(BACKUP YOUR PROJECT FIRST)
Search/Replace In Files...
Find in files... "Screen_1_19"
Replace with... "Welcome"
In Files/Types... "."
Directory...
Match Whole Word Only
Hit "Start"
follow the prompts
rename the files (.xaml & .cs) to be Welcome.???? (where ???? is .xaml or .cs) . Since I use SVN, this step gets done for me in one step (no big deal).
If using VS2010 for steps 1 through 8, be careful do longer string replacements first e.g. Screen_1_19 before Screen_1. I think VS treats _ as a word break. On ultraedit you'll be fine.
If there's interest, in the spare time that I don't currently have, I could release a quick tool to do this on codeplex.
** note: because we are working with XML and XML is very particular about being correct, I close expression blend down, and then reopen it again after the replace/rename to see if I was successful + my screen map still has all the flow lines still drawn in.
answer is above in the body of the question.
I'm looking for a good efficient method for scanning a directory structure for changed files in Windows XP+. Something like how git does it is exactly what I'm looking for, when running a git status it displays all modified files, all new (untracked) files and deleted files very quickly which is exactly what I would like to do.
I have a basic model up and running which performs an initial scan and stores all filenames, size, dates and attributes.
On a subsequent scan it checks if the size, attributes or date have changed and marks as a changed file.
My issue now comes in detecting moved and deleted files. Is there a tried and tested method for this sort of thing? I'm struggling to come up with a good method.
I should mention that it will eventually use ReadDirectoryChangesW to monitor files and alert the user when something changes so a full scan is really a last resort after the initial scan.
Thanks,
J
EDIT: I think I may have described the problem badly. The issue I'm facing is not so much detecting the changes - I have ReadDirectoryChangesW() using IOCP on multiple threads to detected when a change happens, the issue is more what to do with the information. For example, a moved file is reported as a delete followed by a create and a rename comes in 2 parts, old name, followed by new name. So what I'm asking is how to differentiate between the delete as part of a move and an actual delete. I'm guessing buffering the changes and processing batches would be an option but feels messy.
In native code FileSystemWatcher is replaced by ReadDirectoryChangesW. Using this properly is not simple, there is a good baseline to build off here.
I have used this code in a previous job and it worked pretty well. The Win32 API itself (and FileSystemWatcher) are prone to problems that are described in the docs and also discussed in various places online, but impact of those will depending on your use cases.
EDIT: the exact change is indicated in the FILE_NOTIFY_INFORMATION structure that you get back - adds, removals, rename data including old and new name.
I voted Liviu M. up. However, another option if you don't want to use the .NET framework for some reason, would be to use the basic Win32 API call FindFirstChangeNotification.
You can use USN journaling if you are up to it, that is pretty low level (NTFS level) stuff.
Here you can find detailed information and source code included. It is written in C# but most of it is PInvoking C/C++ functions.