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.
Related
Well, I want to make a little console application that can get the weather and all its stats to show up in a little box, and I need to get this from a website, I'm thinking something like weather.com, and I need to do it in C++. I need it to simply grab some weather stats from the site and post them in a list on the console screen, in real time, or at least with a refresh button. Is this even possible or do I need to learn some java to do this?
Try feeds from news channel. Or popular Yahoo website API FOR WHETHER
Hey APIs are not in C or C++ specific(with some exception). You can directly download webpage where you can see whether report. Then press F12 & find under which HTML tag it lies. Then open that web page using socket API. THIS IS JUST SINGLE LINE CODE. for finding that tag you need string functions. Then copy & paste work. Also use threads to update time & date & obviously whether report.
I have an application which has nothing to do with the weather.. however those customers are interested in seeing the weather in a box just like the person who asked for this... in worse case I will call a bash script curl wttr.in and translate the output to nice graphics from Oxygene icons at iconarchive.com.
Who has a better solution?
On my workplace we are not allowed to used Sharepoint Designer, but I need to make a list with customized columns but still maintaining the original style and functionality.
My idea was to find a way to export the list XSL, edit it and use the option to use a custom XSL on the web part.
The thing is, I coudln't find a way to get the XSL, I only found ways to export the XML. I need a way to change how the list is displayed in a way someone else other than me can keep the list updated without needing a lot of programming knowledge
That's a tough one. The technical answer is that the .xsl files start at /_layouts/xsl/main.xsl and /_layouts/xsl/local.xsl, which call more files. However, customization of a list or library will be embedded within the aspx page you're using to view it, and the xsl is "by exception" for anything different than the default templates. SPD creates a whole lot of that exception code automatically. You can try to reverse engineer the main, local, and other xsl files, but that's a herculean task. If you have a specific list and a specific goal, you could post your WebPartPages:XsltListViewWebPart code here or in a new question and someone with SPD could make the changes for you.
One alternative, which you might prefer since it'll leave you in control, is to set up your page to be as close to your desired design as you can, then save the aspx file locally. Using a standalone (maybe even personal) computer, install SPD and (if it comes to it) a copy of SharePoint Foundation. Add your aspx file to that, use SPD to make the changes, and copy the file back. Be sure to keep an eye on the list and view guids, since those'll change between the two, but otherwise they should be the same.
Vista introduced an interface: IFileDialog::SetFilter, which allows me to setup a filter that will be called for every potential filename to see if it should be shown to the user.
Microsoft removed that in Windows 7, and didn't support it in XP.
I am trying to customize the our Open file dialog so that I can control which files are displayed to the end user. These files are marked internally with a product-code - there isn't anything in the filename itself to filter on (hence file extension filters are not useful here -= I need to actually interrogate each one to see if it is within the extra filter parameters that our users specified).
I would guess that Microsoft removed the SetFilter interface because too often it was too slow. I can imagine all sorts of similar ideas to this one which don't scale well for networks and cloud storage and what have you.
However, I need to know if there is an alternative interface that accomplishes the same goal, or if I really am restricted to only looking at the file extension for filtering purposes in my File dialogs?
Follow-up:
After looking further into CDN_INCLUDEITEM, which requires the pre-vista version of OPENFILENAME, I have found that this is the most useless API imaginable. It only filters NON-filesystem objects. In other words, you can't use it to filter files. Or folders. The very things one would filter 99.99% of the time for a file open or save dialog. Unbelievable!
There is a very old article by Paul DiLascia which offers the technique of removing each offending filename from the list view control each time the list view is updated.
However, I know from bitter experience that the list view can update over time. If you're looking at a large folder (many items) or the connection is a bit slow (heavily loaded server and/or large number of files), then the files are added to the dialog piecemeal. So one would have to filter out offending filenames repeatedly.
In fact, our current customized file open dialog uses a timer to look at the view's list of filenames periodically to see if any files of a given pattern exist, in order to enable another control. Otherwise it's possible to check for the existence of these files, find none, but a moment later the view updates to have more filenames, and no events are sent to your dialog to indicate that the view has been changed. In fact, my experience with having to write and maintain code for the common controls file dialogs over the years has been that Microsoft is not very cluefull when it comes to how to write such a thing. Events are incomplete, sent at not-useful times, repeated when not necessary, and whole classes of useful notifications don't exist.
Sadly, I think I might have to give up oh this idea. Unless someone has a thought as to how I might be able to keep up with the view spontaneously changing while the user is trying to interact with it (i.e. it would be awkward to go deleting out entries from the list view and changing the user's visual position, or highlighted files, or scroll position, etc.)
You need to initialise the callbacks for your CFileDialog. Then you need to process CDN_INCLUDEITEM notification code to include or exclude items.
You can also check this great article. The author uses some other approaches in addition to callbacks
As you have already discovered, starting in Windows 7 it is no longer possible to filter out files from being displayed based on content, only file extension. You can, however, validate that the user's selected file(s) are acceptable to you before allowing the dialog to close, and if they are not then display a message box to the user and keep the dialog open. That is the best you will be able to do unless you create your own custom dialog.
I'm trying to find out if there's a way to embed an editable text cell in a PDF generated in a Qt application. I'm currently using QPrinter to generate the PDF, but if there's another library that could do this, that would be fine. The environment is limited, though, to C or C++, so libraries like iText are out. In terms of form capabilities, this pdf,
http://examples.itextpdf.com/results/part2/chapter08/text_fields.pdf, is a good example with the exception that I don't need a password text field.
Thanks,
Frank
This may not be terribly helpful, but I'll throw it out there anyway.
wkhtmltopdf is based on QTWebkit.
One of its command line options is to convert HTML fields into PDF fields (off by default).
There's almost no pdf-related code within wkhtmltopdf. Certainly nothing dealing with fields. Something upstream is doing the PDF conversion for them.
So find out what that "something" is and you're golden.
EDIT: That or spend a lot of time writing JNI wrappers for iText. :/ Having done so myself, I can say it'd be much more interesting to write a JNI generator tailored to iText, but far more practical to write a Java app that uses iText and then make JNI calls from your C/C++ app to pass the data it'll need and retrieve any response.
The form field borders are a part of the page, not the field itself. Odd, but that's not the first time I've encountered it. Our own software, LiquidOffice, used to generate fields with backgrounds AcroForms couldn't support the same way (now we use an icon-only button).
Those Real PDF Fields have their visibility flags set to "visible but doesn't print" within the pDF. I doubt wkhtmltopdf will let you control that directly. Patch time.
BUT, you could make a second pass with some PDF manipulation library to go through and change the visibility settings on your fields. I'm partial to iText, but there are many other fish in that particular sea.
I have many source/text file, say file.cpp or file.txt . Now, I want to see all my code/text in browser, so that it will be easy for me to navigate many files.
My main motive for doing all this is, I am learning C++ myself, so whenever I learn something new, I create some sample code and then compile and run it. Also, along these codes, there are comments/tips for me to be aware of. And then I create links for each file for easy navigation purpose. Since, there are many such files, I thought it would be easy to navigate it if I use this html method. I am not sure if it is OK or good approach, I would like to have some feedback.
What I did was save file.cpp/file.txt into file.html and then use pre and code html tag for formatting. And, also some more necessare html tags for viewing html files.
But when I use it, everything inside < > is lost
eg. #include <iostream> is just seen as #include, and <iostream> is lost.
Is there any way to see it, is there any tag or method that I can use ?
I can use regular HTML escape code < and > for this, to see < > but since I have many include files and changing it for all of them is bit time-consuming, so I want to know if there is any other idea ??
So is there any other solution than s/</< and s/>/>
I would also like to know if there any other ideas/tips than just converting cpp file into html.
What I want to have is,
in my main page something like this,
tip1 Do this
tip2 Do that
When I click tip1, it will open tip1.html which has my codes for that tip. And also there is back link in tip1.html, which will take me back to main page on clicking it. Everything is OK just that everything inside < > is lost,not seen.
Thanks.
You might want to take a look at online tools such as CodeHtmler, which allows you to copy into the browser, select the appropriate language, and it'll convert to HTML for you, together with keyword colourisation etc.
Or, do like many other people and put your documentation in Doxygen format (/** */) with code samples in #verbatim/#endverbatim tags. Doxygen is good stuff.
A few ideas:
If you serve the files as mimetype text/plain, the browser should display the text for you.
You could also possibly configure your browser to assume .cpp is text/plain.
Instead of opening the files directly in the browser, you could serve them with a web server than can change the characters for you.
You could also use SyntaxHighlighter to display the code on the client side using JavaScript.
It is pretty much essential that somewhere along the line you use a program to prevent the characters '<>&' from being (mis-)interpreted by your browser (and expand significant repeated blanks into '` '). You have a couple of options for when/how to do that. You could use static HTML, simply converting each file once before putting it into the web server document hierarchy. This has the least conversion overhead if the files are looked at more often than they are modified. Alternatively, you can configure your web server to server the pages via a filter program (CGI, or something more sophisticated) and serve the output of that in lieu of the file. The advantage is that files are only converted when needed; the disadvantage is that the files are converted each time they are needed. You could get fancy and consider a caching solution - convert the file on first demand but retain the converted file for future use. The main downside there is that the web server needs to be able to write to where the converted file is cached - not necessarily a good idea for security reasons. (A minimalist approach to security requires the document hierarchy to be owned by and only writable by one user, say webmaster, and the web server runs as another user, say webserver. Now the web server cannot do any damage because it cannot write anywhere in the document hierarchy. Simple; effective; restrictive.)
The program can be a simple Perl script or a simple C program (the C source for webcode 1.3 is available here).