Basically, I want to be to be able to pass data between Excel cells and
my C++ program. I don't have any experience in Excel/C++ interactions and I haven't been able to find a coherent explanation or documentation on any websites. If someone could link me some references or provide one themselves it would be much appreciated. Thanks.
If this is for a Windows system, you could always use one of the available managed Excel libraries, such as OfficeWriter or Aspose.
There also might be similar libraries specifically for c++, I know we (OfficeWriter) used to make one.
Edit: Looks like there are a few out there, like LibXL and BasicExcel.
If the application will run on an end user machine with Excel installed, you can easily use the Excel interop and keep Excel hidden.
In addition to LibXL and BasicExcel mentioned by smoore, there is:
ExcelFormat Library is an improved version of the BasicExcel library and will allow you to read and write simple values. It is free.
xlslib will also read and write simple values, I have not tried it tho. It is also free.
Number Duck, is a commercial library that I have written, It supports reading and writing values, formulas and pictures. The website has examples of how to use the features.
Related
I am trying to create C++ code that allows User Input in selecting a variety of fields, then it will calculate many different angles and show the users the results, as well as a graph.
However, it has been suggested to us by our lecturer that it may be a good idea to write the code to these calculations etc in C++, then input the results into Excel.
Does anyone have any idea how to do this? Literally looking for a way for the user to fill in the required values on C++ and then to be AUTOMATICALLY taken to the excel file to show the results in the table and graph format.
If this is not possible, is there a way to display the results in the table and graph format through C++?
Thanks very much in advance
Excel provides COM interface which you can use from your C++ application.
This can be done in the way described in this article:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/216686
This link might also be useful:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/10886/How-to-use-Managed-C-to-Automate-Excel
I think the second link would be better for you as its more of a step by step guide which should help you to workout the answer.
Use COM Automation to automate excel.
The best way to do this is to use the vole library by Matthew Wilson at
http://vole.sourceforge.net/
Take a look at the examples. I do not think there is an example for excel, but there is one for microsoft word at http://www.codeproject.com/KB/COM/VOLE_word.aspx
I have used vole in the past, and it makes it a whole lot easier
Is there any way with pure ColdFusion/cfscript to produce a QR code, without relying on external APIs or JavaScript?
No. ColdFusion cannot generate bar codes by itself. You need a separate tool or library. It is easy enough to install a java library, like ZXing. Then generate the images from CF. Alternately, you could do a <cfhttp> call to an external server that generates the bar code image for you, or basically do the same thing with javascript. You would not need to install anything for the latter two (2) options. But they still rely on an external resource.
Bottom line you need something more than just ColdFusion. What is the reason you cannot use either an external API or javascript? Because without either of those, you are probably out of luck.
Edit based on comments:
If the only restriction is the images must generated locally, then you can use ZXing as described in the link above -OR- any of the other components/libraries mentioned in the other responses, like Joe's suggestion which uses iText (though also based on ZXing).
Some other external APIs
http://cfbarbecue.riaforge.org/
http://zanstra.com/my/Barcode.html?barcode=3PTSP8827A231
If you really wanted to, you could look up (perhaps you need to buy?) the encoding standard for QR codes, which I believe is an ISO standard. Then you could write a program which would output a table with the appropriate number of rows and columns, each with either a black or a white background. I wouldn't recommend this form of "rolling your own" though; it's a lot of work to do essentially what's been done before.
Tim Cunningham wrote a library that is hosted on Github that utilizes iText that does just this very thing. https://github.com/boltz/QRToad
I was looking for a solution to store program settings or options or configuration in C++. These could be settings that are exposed in a GUI and need to be saved between runs of my code.
In my search I came across boost.PropertyTree which seemed to be a good choice. I know boost is well respected code so I'm comfortable using it and so I started developing using this. Then I come across boost.program_options which seems to allow you to do the same thing but also looks more specialized for the specific use-case of program settings.
Now I'm wondering which is the most appropriate for the job? (or is there a 3rd option that is better than both)
EDIT:
fyi this is for a plugin so it will not use command line options (as in, it's not even possible).
UPDATE
I ended up sticking with boost.PropertyTree. I needed to be able to save changed options back to the INI, and I didn't see a way of doing that with boost.program_options.
Use boost::program_options. It's exactly what it's for. In one library you get command line options, environment variables options and an INI-like configuration file parser. And they're all integrated together in the Right way, so when then the user specifies the same option in more than one of these sources the library knows the Right priority order to consider.
boost::property_tree on the other hand is a more generalized library. The library parses the text stream into a uniform data model. But You need to do the real parsing -- that of making sense of the blob of data for your needs. The library doesn't know when to expect a parameter when it sees a particular option string, or to disallow specific values or types of values for a particular option.
After some digging around I think boost.PropertyTree is still the best solution because it gives me the capability to save the options after changing them from within the program which is a requirement.
There is a non-Boost possibility too. Config4Cpp is a robust, simple-to-use and comprehensively documented configuration-file parser library that I wrote. It is available at www.config4star.org.
I suggest you read Chapter 3 (Preferences for a GUI Application) of the Practical Usage Guide manual to read an overview of how Config4Cpp can do what you want. Then open the Getting Started Guide manual, and skim-read Chapters 2 and 3, and Section 7.4 (you might prefer to read the PDF version of that manual). Doing that should give you sufficient details to help you decide if Config4Cpp suits your needs better or worse than Boost.
By the way, the indicated chapters and sections of documentation are short, so they shouldn't take long to read.
I'm using wxWidgets to write cross-plafrom applications. In one of applications I need to be able to load data from Microsoft Excel (.xls) files, but I need this to work on Linux as well, so I assume I cannot use OLE or whatever technology is available on Windows.
I see that there are many open source programs that can read excel files (OpenOffice, KOffice, etc.), so I wonder if there is some library that I could use?
Excel files it needs to support are very simple, straight tabular data. I don't need to extract any formatting except column/row position and the data itself.
Suggestedd reference: What is a simple and reliable C library for working with Excel files?
I came across other libraries (chicago on sf.net, xlsLib) but they seem to be outdated.
jrh
I can say that I know of a wxWidgets application that reads Excel .xls and .xlsx files on any platform. For the .xlsx files we used an XML parser and zip stream reader and grab the data we need, pretty easy to get going. For the .xls files we used: ExcelFormat, which works well and we found the author to be very generous with his support.
Maybe just some encouragement to give it a go? It was a couple of days work to get working.
Maybe http://www.libxl.com/ can help ?
I think that it is not something easy to do. xls files are quite complex and it is a proprietary format.
Maybe this is a stupid idea but why don't you upload and access your doc with Google docs. There are some apis to access your doc.
2 potential problems:
- Your app needs internet access
- Currently there is no C++ api.
But there are api for several languages including python see http://code.google.com/intl/fr/apis/gdata/articles/python_client_lib.html
I've been tasked with creating a tool that can diff and merge the configuration files for my company's product. The configurations are stored as either XML or URL-encoded strings. I'm looking for a library, preferably open source with a license compatible with commercial software, that can do these diffs. Our app is written in C++, so C++ libraries would be best, but I'm willing to look at libraries that are C#-specific since I can write a wrapper that exposes it to C++ via COM. Three-way diffs would be ideal, but two-way is acceptable. If it has an understanding of XML, that would also be a plus (since XML nodes can be reordered without changing the document, etc). Any library suggestions? Should I even consider writing my own diff tools in the hopes of giving it semantic knowledge of our formats?
Thanks to this similar question, I've already discovered this google library, which seems really great, but I'm still looking for other options. It also seems to be able to output the diffs in HTML format (using the <ins> and <del> tags that I didn't know existed before I discovered it), which could be really handy, but it seems to be a unified diff only. I'm going to need to display the results in a web browser, and probably have to build an interface for doing the merges in the browser as well. I don't expect a library to be able to help with these tasks, but it must produce output in a format that is amenable to me building this on top of it. I'm currently envisioning something along the lines of TortoiseMerge (side-by-side diffs, not unified), except browser-based. Any tips/tricks/design ideas on how to present this would be appreciated too.
Subversion comes with libsvn_diff and libsvn_delta licensed under Apache Software License.
Here is a C++ library that can diff what the author calls semistructured data. It deals nicely with HTML and XML. Since your data is XML it would make a lot of sense to use this instead of plain text diff. This is especially the case when the files are machine generated.
I am currently trying to use this library to build a tool that diffs Visual Studio project files. These are basically XML files and using a plain diff tool like Winmerge is too painful because Visual Studio pretty much mucks up the whole file by crazy reordering. The idea is to do some kind of a structured diff to address the problem.
For diffing the XML I would propose that you normalize it first: sort all the elements in alphabetic order, then generate a stream of tokens/xml that represents the original document but is independent of the original formatting. After running the diff, parse the result to get a tree containing what was added / removed.