In many banks, people use all kind of addins mostly programmed in C++ to compute various risks and values.
My question is: considering an Excel environment with in-house Excel addins doing most of the work. Is there a format of debug information you would recommend to generate useful debug information which could be readable and avoid our developers to systematically have to debug the code using Visual Studio ?
At the moment, what I do is that in my code, I generate .csv files containing the intermediate computations in a readable format.
The files have tickers such as Risk-1-Stock-2012-08-13_8h33m00.csv which are generated on the fly and optionally produced in the temp folder. The problem is that, while it fits my purpose, it does not seem flexible enough to be used by everyone else and some other people have had their own implementations within the same project of a similar set of functions.
Maybe someone here has a 'silver bullet' which would make reporting debug information in a standard and readable format much easier ?
Related
I am working on an really large multi language project (1000+ Classes + Configs + Scripts), with files distributed over network drives. I am having trouble fighting through the code, since the available Tools are not helping. The main problem is finding things. For the C++ Part: VS with VAX can only find files and symbols which are in the solution. A lot of them are not. Same problem with Reshaper. Right now i am stuck with doing unindexed string and file searches, which is highly inefficient on a network drive. I heared that SourceInsight would be an option since it allows you to just specify the folders that are part of the project and than indexes them, but my company wont spent money on it.
So my question ist: what Tools are there available to fight through an incredible large amount of code? And if possible they should be low cost or even free/open source.
Check out -
ctags
cscope
idutils
snavigator
In every one of these tools, you would have to invest(*) some time in reading the documentation, and then building your index. Consider switching to an editor that will work with these tools.
(*): I do mean invest, because it will reap dividends once you do.
hope this helps,
If you need to maintain a large amount of code, you really should have a source code managment system, a lot of them will help you find text by indexing all the files
And Most of them will work with various language.
Otherwise you can install some indexer like Apache Lucene and index all your files...
You should take a look at LXR. This is used by many Linux kernel source listings.
Try ndexer http://code.google.com/p/ndexer/
promises to Handle extremely large codebases!
The Perl program ack is also worth a look -- think of it as multi-file grep on steroids. The new version (in what I would call late beta) even lets you specify regexes for the files to process as well as regexes to search for -- a feature I've used extensively since it came out (I've got a subproject with 30k lines in 300+ classes, where this feature has been very helpful). You can even chain the new ack with itself so you can subselect the files to process.
VS with VAX can only find files and symbols which are in the solution. A lot of them are not.
You can add all the files that are not in your solution and set them to not build in the settings. Your VS build will not be affected by this, but now VS knows about those files and you can search them along with your VS native files.
I've not done much coding for Windows lately, and I find myself sitting at Visual Studio right now, making a small program for Windows 7 in C++. I need some configuration data to be read/written.
In the old days, (being a Borland kind of guy) I'd just use a TIniFile and keep the .ini beside my exe Obviously this is just not the done thing any more. The MS docs tell me that Get/WritePrivateProfileString are for compatibility only, and I doubt that I'd get away with writing to Program Files these days. Gosh I feel old.
I'd like the resulting file to be easily editable - open in notepad sort of thing, and easily findable. This is a small app, I don't want to have to write a setup screen when I can just edit the config file.
So, what is the modern way of doing this?
Often people use XML files for storing preferences, but they are often overkill (and they aren't actually all that readable for humans).
If your needs would be easily satisfied with an INI file, you may want to use Boost.Program_options using the configuration file parser backend, which actually writes INI-like files without going through deprecated (and slow!) APIs, while exposing a nice C++ interface.
The key thing to get right is where to write such configuration file. The right place is usually a subdirectory (named e.g. as your application) of the user's application data directory; please, please, please, don't harcode its path in your executable, I've seen enough broken apps failing to understand that the user profile may not be in c:\Documents and settings\Username.
Instead, you can retrieve the application data path using the SHGetFolderPath function with CSIDL_APPDATA (or SHGetKnownFolderPath with FOLDERID_RoamingAppData if you don't mind to lose the compatibility with pre-Vista Windows versions, or even just expanding the %APPDATA% environment variable).
In this way, each user will be able to store its preferences and you won't get any security-related errors when writing your preferences.
This is my opinion (which I think most of the answers you get will be opinion), but it seems that the standard way of doing things these days is to store config files like these in C:\Users\<Username>. Moreover, it is generally good to not clutter this directory itself, but to use a subdirectory for the purpose of storing your application's data, such as C:\Users\<Username>\AppData\Roaming\<YourApplicationName>. It might be overkill for a single config file, but that will give you the opportunity to have all of your application data in one place, should you add even more.
from a c++ program i need to print a simple label. the label contains a text, an image and a barcode.(in my project the label is more complex, this is just for example)
my customer need a way to customize che label layout.
in the past in java I solve this problem using a report created with jasperreport. my customer customize the report with ireport and then i fill the data with an hashtable datasource (i never connect to an sql database)
anybody know a way to obtain something like this in java
really sorry for my scholastic english
Offhand, it's a bit hard to say -- most report generators assume some sort of database (SQL or at least accessible via ODBC) as the data source. I'd probably look into some that are free and include source code so you can change the data source (though I've no idea how difficult a modification that will be).
The other problem is that printing anything but plain text is somewhat non-portable; you'll need different code for Linux, Mac/OS or Windows. For Windows, one possibility would be Report Generator from CodeProject.com. If you want something more portable, you could use something like Xport to create XHTML output to be viewed in/printed from a browser (or any number of other programs that understand [X]HTML (there's also a commercial version). Of course, you could generate output in any number of other formats that support graphics, such as Postscript/PDF, LaTex, etc. This lets you use portable code to generate the report, but usually requires some non-portable code to invoke a viewer.
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.
I have a substantial body of source code (OOFILE) which I'm finally putting up on Sourceforge. I need to decide if I should go with a monolithic include directory or keep the header files with the source tree.
I want to make this decision before pushing to the svn repo on SourceForge. I expect a lot of people who use it after that move will keep a working copy checked out directly from SF so won't want to change their structure.
The full source tree has about 262 files in 25 folders. There are a lot more classes than that suggests as due to conforming to 8.3 character names (yes it dates back to Win3.1) many classes are in one file. As I used to develop with ObjectMaster, that never bothered me but I will be splitting it up to conform to more recent trends to minimise the number of classes per file. From a quick skim of the class list, there are about 600 classes.
OOFILE is a cross-platform product expected to be built on Mac, Windows and assorted Unix platforms. As it started life on Mac, with compilers that point to include trees rather than flat include dirs, headers were kept with the source.
Later, mainly to keep some Visual Studio users happy, a build was reorganised with a single include directory. I'm trying to choose between those models.
The entire OOFILE product covers quite a few domains:
database front-end
range of database backends
simple 2D graphing engine for Mac and Windows
simple character-mode report-writer for trivial html and text listing
very rich banding report-writer with Mac and Windows Preview and Printing and cross-platform generation of text, RTF, HTML and XML reports
forms integration engine for easy CRUD forms binding to the database, with implementations on PowerPlant and MFC
cross-platform utility classes
file and directory manipulation
strings
arrays
XML and tag generation
Many people only want to use it on a single platform and some of those code areas are pure legacy (eg: PowerPlant UI framework on classic Mac). It therefore seems people would appreciate not having headers from those unwanted areas dumped in their monolithic include directory.
I started thinking about having an include directory split up into a few of the domains above and then realised that was sounding more like the original structure.
In summary, the choices seem to be:
Keep original model, all headers adjacent to source - max flexibility at cost of some complex includes in projects.
one include directory with everything inside
split includes by domain, so there may be about 6 directories for someone using the lot but a pure database user would probably have a single directory.
From a Unix build aspect, the recommended structure has been 2. My situation is complicated by needing to keep Visual Studio and XCode users happy (sniff, CodeWarrior, how I doth miss thee!).
Edit - the chosen solution:
I went with four subdirectories in include. I started trying to divide them up further by platform but it just got very noisy very quickly.
Personally I would go with 2, or 3 if really pushed.
But whichever you choose, please make it crystal clear in the build instructions how to set up the include paths. Nothing dooms an open source project more than it being really difficult to build - developers want a quick out-of-the-box experience and if it involves faffing around with many undocumented environment variables (or whatever) most will simply go away.