Retrieve information from CArchive File - visual-c++

Is there any way to retrieve information from a CArchive file if we don't know what type of objects are stored in the CArchive file?
I want to know in what format information is stored in a CArchive file.
Please help me out in this.

The file format is documented under TN002: Persistent Object Data Format. While that explains how objects are identified in the data stream for deserialization, the actual logic to dump data into the CArchive and to read it back is at the discretion of the CObject-derived class implementation for classes that use the DECLARE_SERIAL and IMPLEMENT_SERIAL macros.
Without the actual (de-)serialization code there's little you can do with a binary CArchive stream, unless the implementation that produced it uses the standard serialization methods throughout, allowing you to guess the data types stored.
Unlike JSON or XML, though, a CArchive's serialized data isn't self-describing. Even when you know the type of any given piece of data, there's nothing in the file that carries any semantic information.

Related

Spotify gives corrupted data in HTTP Toolkit

I'm trying to watch spotify packages on the emulator, but the data sent and received are corrupted. How can I solve this problem?
İmages:
I tried reading the data many times but it always looks like this. I want to see the data properly in JSON form.
This data is not corrupted, it's just not in the format you want.
You can see the format by looking at the content-type header, which says application/protobuf.
This is not JSON data. Instead it's Protobuf, which is a general-purpose serialization format, similar to JSON or XML, but designed to be faster to process and smaller to transfer, in part by being sent as raw binary data, instead of readable strings.
To deserialize this 100% correctly, you will need the Protobuf schema for the API you're talking to (a .proto file). In many cases, unless this is your own or a publicly documented API, that's not going to be available.
You can still try to decode the data into raw data types though, although that might not allow you to decode all information immediately. There's more info on that here: raw decoder for protobufs format. Decoding data like this works best using the protoc command-line tool, but you may also be able to decode this data using https://protobuf-decoder.netlify.app/. Note that that takes hex data, not a raw string like you have here, so you'll have to pick the 'Hex' option for the body in HTTP Toolkit to copy the hex codes over instead.
I can only extract data from here, how can I use them with python requests? I want to convert them to dictionary data type. Or can we solve this using https://github.com/spotify/proto-requests? I'm trying to write a program on Spotify.

Workflow for interpreting linked data in .ttl files with Python RDFLib

I am using turtle files containing biographical information for historical research. Those files are provided by a major library and most of the information in the files is not explicit. While people's professions, for instance, are sometimes stated alongside links to the library's URIs, I only have URIs in the majority of cases. This is why I will need to retrieve the information behind them at some point in my workflow, and I would appreciate some advice.
I want to use Python's RDFLib for parsing the .ttl files. What is your recommended workflow? Should I read the prefixes I am interested in first, then store the results in .txt (?) and then write a script to retrieve the actual information from the web, replacing the URIs?
I have also seen that there are ways to convert RDFs directly to CSV, but although CSV is nice to work with, I would get a lot of unwanted "background noise" by simply converting all the data.
What would you recommend?
RDFlib's all about working with RDF data. If you have RDF data, my suggestion is to do as much RDF-native stuff that you can and then only export to CSV if you want to do something like print tabular results or load into Pandas DataFrames. Of course there are always more than one way to do things, so you could manipulate data in CSV, but RDF, by design, has far more information in it than a CSV file can so when you're manipulating RDF data, you have more things to get hold of.
most of the information in the files is not explicit
Better phrased: most of the information is indicated with objects identified by URIs, not given as literal values.
I want to use Python's RDFLib for parsing the .ttl files. What is your recommended workflow? Should I read the prefixes I am interested in first, then store the results in .txt (?) and then write a script to retrieve the actual information from the web, replacing the URIs?
No! You should store the ttl files you can get and then you may indeed retrieve all the other data referred to by URI but, presumably, that data is also in RDF form so you should download it into the same graph you loaded the initial ttl files in to and then you can have the full graph with links and literal values it it as your disposal to manipulate with SPARQL queries.

How to use in-build Core Data XML serialisation?

I use Cocoa's Core Data framework which has the possibility of writing the data to XML via NSXMLStoreType.
For Copy & Paste in my app would I now like to write some core data objects to NSPasteboard and read it from there again. I thought that it should be able to read and write the in-build XML representation. Of course could I create a Codable interface for my core data classes, but I rather reuse the core data implementation.
How can I do this best?
Many thanks in advance!
The problem with this strategy is that the details of the XML store's schema implementation is internal to Apple. If you're going to use the results with another XML store, you should be ok. But I wouldn't expect the XML schema Apple uses to lend itself to being useful outside of that context, as it is written to disk, or depend on it not to change.
You can specify the store type when configuring an instance of NSPersistantContainer by setting its persistentStoreDescriptions property. NSPersistentStoreDescription has a type property, which can be set to NSXMLStoreType.

Should I use NSFileWrappers in UIManagedDocument?

I am trying to store a plist and several binary files (let's say images) as part of an UIManagedDocument. The name of the binary files are an attribute in Core Data and I don't need to enumerate them, just access the right one when showing the related entity.
The file structure that I want to have is:
- <File yyyyMMdd-HHmmss>.extdoc
- StoreContent
- persistentStore
- AdditionalContent
- ListStatus.plist (used to store per document defaults)
- Images
- uuid1.png
- uuid2.png
- ...
- uuidn.png
So far, I have successfully followed the instructions in How do I save additional content into my UIManagedDocument file packages?, but when I try to add the binary files there are some things that I don't know how to do.
Should I treat the URL /the/path/File yyyyMMdd-HHmmss.extdoc/AdditionalContent (the default one provided with readAdditionalContentFromURL:error:) as a NSFileWrapper? Are there any advantages/disadvantages vs just using the URLs? I find it more complicated to use the file wrapper, since the plist has to be read using the file wrapper accessors and NSCoder (I guess), and the files, I have to store the file wrapper for the Images directory and then obtain the corresponding node with objectForKey (I assume). But Apple's Document-Based Apps Programming Guide for iOS regarding custom formats instead of NSData or NSFileWrapper, states "Keep in mind that your code will have to duplicate what UIDocument does for you, and so you must deal with greater complexity and a greater possibility of error." Am I misunderstanding this?
Per document defaults are declared as properties: the setter modifies the NSDictionary that maps the plist and marks the document as updated, and the getter accesses the dictionary with the proper key. How do I expose the ability to read/write the binary files? Should I add a method to my subclass of UIManagedDocument? - (void)writeImage:(NSString*)uuid; and -(UIImage *)readImage:(NSString *)uuid; And should I keep this data in memory until the document is saved? How?
Assuming that NSFileWrapper is the way to go, if I plan to use this document with iCloud should I use file coordinators with the file wrapper? If so, how?
Any source code for each question will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
P.S.: I know that I could save some binary data inside of Core Data, but I don't feel comfortable with that solution. Among other reasons, I rather store the PNG data for image files that a serialized version of UIImage that won't be compatible with NSImage if I want to create a desktop app.
I'd like to say that, in general I rather like UIManagedDocument. It has a few advantages over raw Core Data. For example, it sets up the entire core data stack for you automatically. It also sets up nested managed object contexts for you, so you get free background saving. None of that is particularly earth-shattering, but it's a lot of functionality from a tiny amount of code.
I haven't played around with saving additional information...but here are my thoughts.
First, you shouldn't need to treat the new URL as a file wrapper. You should just be able to do regular file operations on the provided URL. Just make sure you have everything implemented properly in additionalContentForURL:error:, writeAdditionalContent:toURL:originalContentsURL:error: and readAdditionalContentFromURL:error:. The read and write operations need to be symmetric. And you should probably snapshot your data in additionalContentsForURL:error: so that everything will be saved in a known, good state (since the save operations are asynchronous).
As an alternative, have you considered using the Store in External Record File flag in your data model instead of saving it manually? This should force Core Data to (depending on the size of the binary data) automatically store them externally. I looked at the release notes, and I didn't see anything saying you couldn't use this feature with iCloud. That might be the easiest fix.
Attacking a side point for the moment (as I have not had ANY good experience with UIManagedDocument).
You can save the binary inside of Core Data for a iOS 5.0+ application using the external file reference. Then you can save the PNG of the image to Core Data directly and not need to worry about a UIManagedDocument or about bloating the sqlite file.
There is nothing stopping you from storing the PNG instead of a UIImage.
One other thought. You may need to use an NSFileCoordinator for the read and write operations. Technically, any read or write operations in the iCloud container need to use a file coordinator (to coordinate with the iCloud sync service--this prevents accidentally corrupting a file by reading it while another process is writing to it).
I know that UIDocument wraps most of its input and output methods automatically. I'd guess that these methods are similarly wrapped (since they give you a URL to use)--However, the docs aren't very clear.

What is the act of creating objects from XML data called?

In the context of loading an XML file, what's a good name for the step in which you create internal data structures (be they objects, structs, or whatever) to hold the data in memory? What do you usually call the other steps?
LOAD, OPEN, or READ the xml, by opening a file.
PARSE the xml, with some XML parser.
??? the xml, creating data structures.
Options that have come to mind for step 3 are: handle, create_foobars, create_foobars_from_xml, or even read, load, or parse.
One other option that comes to mind is to have an object's constructor take an xml entity, but I'm not fond of coupling the objects to the xml schema like that.
Deserialization is the correct term for the "???" part of your question. If you want to convert the object back to XML, then that would be (you guessed it) serialization.
Deserialization or unmarshalling.

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