Here is the scenario. I have an XML document which contains tags. I want to create a transform that does this
<tag>content A</tag> 1. content A
<tag>content B</tag> ----> 2. content B
<tag>content C</tag> 3. content C
but only if the tag contents appear on the same physical page. The numbering should restart on each new page. Is there any way to do this using XSL-FO? I know with latex the only way to accomplish something like this is to run latex twice, with the interim document used to determine content page placement.
As far as I can tell (and as confirmed by the Antenna House tech support team), there is no way to do this using standard XSL-FO. Antenna House offers <axf:footnote*/> extensions which include the ability to set an axf:footnote-number-reset="page" attribute, and as suggested in the comments, RenderX offers a generic mechanism which might be used for this purpose, but both of these involve vendor-specific extensions to the language.
This points to a number of shortcomings in XSL-FO that really should have been addressed a long time ago with a 2.0 version of the specification. A w3c committee to develop an XSL-FO 2.0 spec was formed and then disbanded quite some time ago; I have no idea why, as I find the tool indispensable for a large class of document to PDF conversions.
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.
I have generated documents ( in Docx, Xlsx, PDF formats) using ReportViewer.WebForms.
Problem is, I need few additional formats (Html and Rtf), so i made conversions using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word. Basicly it's opens file and saves it in different format.
Whats need to be done in server side (besides installing word, only word is enough?)?I know it's bad practice, but are there any other solutions?
P.S.Commercial librarys like Aspose.Words are awesome, but project is too small to buy license.
P.P.S. Those two formats will be rearly used, so performance is not very big issue. Documents quite simple, no more than simple 3 tables.
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I am starting work on a new piece of software that will end up needing some robust and expandable file IO. There are a lot of formats out there. XML, JSON, INI, etc. However, there are always plusses and minuses so I thought I would ask for some community input.
Here are some rough requirements:
The format is a "standard"...I don't want to reinvent the wheel if I don't have to. It doesn't have to be a formal IEEE standard, but something you could Google and get some information on as a new user, may have some support tools (editors) beyond vi. (Though the software users will generally be computer savvy and happy to use vi.)
Easily integrates with C++. I don't want to have to pull along a 100mb library and three different compilers to get it up and running.
Supports tabular input (2d, n-dimensional)
Supports POD types
Can expand as more inputs are required, binds well to variables, etc.
Parsing speed is not terribly important
Ideally, as easy to write (reflect) as it is to read
Works well on Windows and Linux
Supports compositing (one file referencing another file to read, and so on.)
Human Readable
In a perfect world, I would use a header-only library or some clean STL implementation, but I'm fine with leveraging Boost or some small external library if it works well.
So, what are your thoughts on various formats? Drawbacks? Advantages?
Edit
Options to consider? Anything else to add?
XML
YAML
SQLite
Google Protocol Buffers
Boost Serialization
INI
JSON
There is one excellent format that meets all your criteria:
SQLite!
Please read article about using SQLite as an application file format. Also, please watch Google Tech Talk by D. Richard Hipp (SQLite author) about this very topic.
Now, lets see how SQLite meets your requirements:
The format is a "standard"
SQLite has become format of choice for most mobile environments, and for many desktop apps (Firefox, Thunderbird, Google Chrome, Adobe Reader, you name it).
Easily integrates with C++
SQLite has standard C interface, which is only one source file and one header file. There are C++ wrappers too.
Supports tabular input (2d, n-dimensional)
SQLite table is as tabular as you could possibly imagine. To represent say 3-dimensional data, create table with columns x,y,z,value and store your data as a set of rows like this:
x1,y1,z1,value1
x2,y2,z2,value2
...
Supports POD types
I assume by POD you meant Plain Old Data, or BLOB. SQLite lets you store BLOB fields as is.
Can expand as more inputs are required, binds well to variables
This is where it really shines.
Parsing speed is not terribly important
But SQLite speed is superb. In fact, parsing is basically transparent.
Ideally, as easy to write (reflect) as it is to read
Just use INSERT to write and SELECT to read - what could be easier?
Works well on Windows and Linux
You bet, and all other platforms as well.
Supports compositing (one file referencing another file to read)
You can ATTACH one database to another.
Human Readable
Not in binary, but there are many excellent SQLite browsers/editors out there. I like SQLite Expert Personal on Windows and sqliteman on Linux. There is also SQLite editor plugin for Firefox.
There are other advantages that SQLite gives you for free:
Data is indexable which makes it very fast to search. You just cannot do this using XML, JSON or any other text-only formats.
Data can be edited partially, even when amount of data is very large. You do not have to rewrite few gigabytes just to edit one value.
SQLite is fully transactional: it guarantees that your data is consistent at all times. Even if your application (or whole computer) crashes, your data will be automatically restored to last known consistent state on next first attempt to connect to the database.
SQLite stores your data verbatim: you do not need to worry about escaping junk characters in your data (including zero bytes embedded in your strings) - simply always use prepared statements, that's all it takes to make it transparent. This can be big and annoying problem when dealing with text data formats, XML in particular.
SQLite stores all strings in Unicode: UTF-8 (default) or UTF-16. In other words, you do not need to worry about text encodings or international support for your data format.
SQLite allows you to process data in small chunks (row by row in fact), thus it works well in low memory conditions. This can be a problem for any text based formats, because often they need to load all text into memory to parse it. Granted, there are few efficient stream-based XML parsers out there, but in general any XML parser will be quite memory greedy compared to SQLite.
Having worked quite a bit with both XML and json, here's my rather subjective opinion of both as extendable serialization formats:
The format is a "standard": Yes for both
Easily integrates with C++: Yes for both. In each case you'll probably wind up with some kind of library to handle it. On Linux, libxml2 is a standard, and libxml++ is a C++ wrapper for it; you should be able to get both of those from your distro's package manager. It will take some small effort to get those working on Windows. There appears to be some support in Boost for json, but I haven't used it; I've always dealt with json using libraries. Really, the library route is not very onerous for either.
Supports tabular input (2d, n-dimensional): Yes for both
Supports POD types: Yes for both
Can expand as more inputs are required: Yes for both - that's one big advantage to both of them.
Binds well to variables: If what you mean is some way inside the file itself to say "This piece of data must be automatically deserialized into this variable in my program", then no for both.
As easy to write (reflect) as it is to read: Depends on the library you use, but in my experience yes for both. (You can actually do a tolerable job of writing json using printf().)
Works well on Windows and Linux: Yes for both, and ditto Mac OS X for that matter.
Supports one file referencing another file to read: If you mean something akin to a C #include, then XML has some ability to do this (e.g. document entities), while json doesn't.
Human readable: Both are typically written in UTF-8, and permit line breaks and indentation, and thus can be human-readable. However, I've just been working with a 479 KB XML file that's all on one line, so I had to run it through a prettyprinter to make sense of it. json can also be pretty unreadable, but in my experience is often formatted better than XML.
When starting new projects, I generally prefer json; it's more compact and more human-readable. The main reason I might select XML over json would be if I were worried about receiving badly-formed documents, since XML supports automated document format validation, while you have to write your own validation code with json.
Check out google buffers. This handles most of your requirements.
From their documentation, the high level steps are:
Define message formats in a .proto file.
Use the protocol buffer compiler.
Use the C++ protocol buffer API to write and read messages.
For my purposes, I think the way to go is XML.
The format is a standard, but allows for modification and flexibility for the schema to change as the program requirements evolve.
There are several library options. Some are larger (Xerces-C) some are smaller (ezxml), but there are many options, so we won't be locked in to a single provider or very specific solution.
It can supports tabular input (2d, n-dimensional). This requires more parsing work on "our" end, and is likely the weakest point for XML.
Supports POD types: Absolutely.
Can expand as more inputs are required, binds well to variables, etc. through schema modifications and parser modifications.
Parsing speed is not terribly important, so processing a text file or files is not an issue.
XML can be programmatically written just as easily as read.
Works well on Windows and Linux or any other OS that supports C and text files.
Supports compositing (one file referencing another file to read, and so on.)
Human Readable with many text editors (Sublime, vi, etc.) supporting syntax highlighting out of the box. Many web browsers display the data well.
Thanks for all the great feedback! I think if we wanted a purely binary solution, Protocol Buffers or boost::serialization is likely the way that we would go.
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.