Update: It appears that VS doesn't have the hooks needed to do what is needed in my use case. However there are a couple of options that could work for other people and as such I'm marking the question as answered but I would love to find a solution that works for me.
We have encrypted files that are routinely kept in encrypted form within source control (TFS). When I want to compare versions I use Beyond Compare and have added the encryption/decryption tool as filtering on the read/write process to allow plain text viewing and editing.
However if I just want to open the file for reading/editing it's a bit tedious using a dummy comparison just to view/edit the file.
As such as I wondering if there is a configuration setting or way in Visual Studio that would allow me to insert a filter on the read/write so that it could display/edit/save files that would otherwise be unreadable.
Edit:
*NB: The encryption aspect is just single use case *, I'm actually looking for a generic answer that doesn't require writing an editor to replace the editors within VS that already exist such as the MS supplied XML editor or the custom third party ones.
I have both custom and non custom files that are encrypted. Each file type already has an editor. We have no access to the source for any of these editors. The problem is that the file is encrypted in TFS, and all I need is the filtering on the read and write for all files regardless of editor.
I want to use all the existing features of the installed editors without change. Only the reading and writing need to be customised.
Here's a potentially hacky way to achieve what you are trying to do, if there is no other easy option.
TFS stores data in a SQL database. Therefore you can theoretically modify the read/edit command that is used to extract the data from TFS and send it to the editor/viewer. This might involve modifying a stored procedure, or putting a trigger in place to modify the data before it is presented to the editor.
You would need to run a Profiler Trace on the TFS database when you click on edit/view or browse to the node in the source control tree. This will help you to figure out what data TFS is accessing and what functions/stored procs/tables etc it used to extract said data.
The same in reverse; you'd need to modify the 'writing' of the data to use your custom tool before putting it in the DB.
SQL has the ability to call CLR code, so you could use your tool if it's written in .NET.
The easiest way would be to download the 2012 SDK, Microsoft already provide a nice walkthrough on how to implement your custom editor HERE.
The process is:
Install the SDK
Fire up VS2012; Select New Project -> Other Proj Types -> Visual Studio Package
Visual C#, company name, etc...
Tick the "Custom Editor" tickbox
Fill in the rest of the details
So now you're presented with all the source of a vanilla text editor, and the part you want to hook in to is the IPersistFileFormat::Load() and IPersistFileFormat::Save() functions found under EditorPane.cs and put your encryption/decryption routines in there, thus you'll be left with a text editor with a custom encrypted file format.
This may not do what you need, since you need to call third party exe. However this answer may be useful for others that have access to source code (or a dll or library).
You could write a file system filter that encrypts/ decrypts the data to and from disk. Note that the driver sits at the OS level, and is outside of Visual Studio.
From the MSDN article File Systems and File System Filter Drivers:
A file system filter driver intercepts requests targeted at a file system or another file system filter driver. By intercepting the request before it reaches its intended target, the filter driver can extend or replace functionality provided by the original target of the request. Examples of File Systems and File System Filter Drivers include anti-virus filters, backup agents, and encryption products.
See this Code Project article for a tutorial: File System Filter Driver Tutorial. The article does not show how to do encryption/ decryption, but shows how to get a simple driver up and running.
There are extensions that will capture events to the current window save for example and what turns out to be document load. ** This is not a custom editor **
check out the following two links:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd885244.aspx
and a fairly complete open source addin that works with files when saved (regardless of type)
https://bitbucket.org/s_cadwallader/codemaid/src/7cf1bf6108801f48b85e30d85e1646fbc73ba889/CodeMaid/Integration/Events/RunningDocumentTableEventListener.cs?at=default
which hooks the RDT table to extend the current environment. You would need to adjust from here of course but this should get you going in the right direction.
Related
I want to create custom documents on my website which is running on a Linux-based server. My website has user login capability to access specific details on the website.
What I want to do is:
Use a default .tex file where the contents of the main document are stored. This would be available on the server (on admin side);
Get few user specific inputs (like login name, the day and date when the request was made), their custom inputs like what specific details they want (this will make it possible to include or exclude few chapters, sections from the document);
Using the inputs received above (in point 2), the document would be customized on the fly on the website by running LaTeX compiler and the output of the compilation would be shared with the user.
My questions are:
Has someone tried this before? Any suggestions, alternatives they can point to? If there is any other better solution than LaTeX, I am open to hear and understand that as well.
Are there any specific settings that we need to do either on the server or on LaTeX installation that will enable doing this?
Any additional packages, programs are required to be installed to get this working?
Any help and insights would be appreciated.
You can generate PDF using appropriate libraries for programming language you use for your back-end. This is definitely safer than injecting user input into TeX file and probably would be faster too.
PHP: Best way to create a PDF with PHP
Ruby: https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn
anything else: google for "$LANGUAGE generate pdf".
The first and the second questions can be done in any programming language you choose while reading the .tex template and add/omit the data, then save it to the temporal .tex file. After compilation yo can remove this file. If you are working with a linux server you can use a service (cron, systemd) to automate the cleaning of files.
To compile and get the file you must use pdflatex command line program, which is the one any LaTeX editor uses. I compile my LaTeX documents this way in linux. I think this way is quite fast, except if you want images in this document, or are using tikz pictures.
I know I am suggesting the old way to do the work, but usually is the best way.
And, finally, I think PHDComics uses something like this for the emergency button (down in the right), only that in the site the pdf is already generated for the specific comic: http://www.phdcomics.com/
I have a scenario where .egp's are created on Windows environment. As part of migration these need to be migrated to UNIX/Linux server and from EG 4.1 to 4.2 and we have to make the programs comply with LINUX/Unix standards (like font casing) and the directory paths to the linux or unix environment.
As we have around 300 .egp's to be migrarted, Say in the first go if we use migration wizard on sas eg 4.2 version to automatically have the .egp's converted to 4.2 standards, the bigggest question is how to incorporate changes to the sas programs.Is there any automated way to extract the program from respective node in .egp, edit and insert at the same node.
Thanks in advance.
If the code exists purely in EG, not that I'm aware of via SAS - EG is not itself programmable.
If the code objects are stored as physical files outside of EG they could conceivably be imported into EG (by looping over the folders involved) and some text substitution done.
Alternatively it involves a full on scripting language. EG files are zip files, and once uncompressed contain .sas text files in subfolders within the zip file. It should be possible to iterate over them all and make the required changes.
In neither case will it be much fun. (Though doing it manually doesn't sound great either.)
Talk to SAS - they may have a tool they've put together for someone else they can let you have.
I'm looking to create code completion for a custom language in Visual Studio. I already have code for some simpler editor interaction, like syntax highlighting and brace matching. Now I want to move to code completion. But I've run into a slight problem- data sources.
Like in a language such as C#, I implicitly share code between more than one file. This implies that, in order to code complete one file, I need to know the contents of the other files. More specifically, whilst I could simply iterate through the project and project items and crack open the files, this is a suboptimal solution. For example, I wouldn't be able to code complete unsaved changes the user has made. For another, I already did a lot of processing work lexing or parsing the contents to fill the user's request for syntax highlighting and whatnot, and I have no desire to duplicate that work.
How can I access the contents of the other files in the project, and obtain their ITextBuffers so I can re-use the work I already did?
There is no ITextBuffer provided for files which exist on disk but are not currently open in Visual Studio. It is possible to create an instance of ITextBuffer for any arbitrary file by using ITextDocumentFactoryService::CreateAndLoadDocument. This takes a string and will give back an ITextDocument instance from which you can access an ITextBuffer.
In order to find the existing ITextBuffer for files that are currently open you can do the following
IVsRunningDocumentTable::FindDocument This takes a file path and returns a cookie representing that file if it is currently open (Example)
IVsRunningDocumentTable::GetDocumentInfo This takes a cookie and returns back an IVsTextLines instance (Example)
IVsEditorAdaptersFactoryService::GetDataBuffer takes an IVsTextLines and gives back an ITextBuffer (Example)
I have a program that can access a database with a whole bunch of articles.
Due to copyright, I can't access the database straight from my program, but I have a different program that can access it, and it's legitimate to copy small bits from the articles.
Because my friends and I quote a lot from these articles, I thought it would be useful if we could find an add-in for Word that will copy the requested part from an article.
Is there any add-in for Word that would let me use the program that I mentioned above so that I can access the database from within Word?
I would like to program this add-in myself, if possible.
Without further information about which operating system, and version of Word you are using, I can offer only a general outline.
1) It seems to me that you want to make a Word macro using Word Basic, or Visual Basic.
2) When you want to call your program which is external to Word, you need to use the shell command as outlined here from Microsoft's webpage.
I hope that helps you get started writing your macro!
CHEERS
Well its a wrokaround but you can use an automation tool which can run a sequence of actions on a given GUI like Winrunner or TestQuest to semulate the usage of the program, i assume these tools can get an input from a given xml or text file and log outputs in log text file.
If you have the output in a text file you will be able to parse the file using any programmign language and get the information you need and write it to eord or whatever format using OLE objects.
I need to be able to GZip compress a file in an Excel VBA function. Specifically I need to be able to use the 'deflate' algorithm.
Is there a way to do this without having to exec a command line application? With no dependency on external tools the code will be more robust.
Ideally the code would make use of pre-installed VBA or COM library functions - I don't want to have to implement this logic myself or install DLLs etc.
If possible, I want installation of the function to be as simple as adding a .xla to the available Excel Add-Ins. No DLLs, EXEs, registry entries etc. required.
Edit Can I make use of the .NET GZipStream to do this?
VBA (which is really a dialect of VB6) is slow for these kind of applications. I remember I once implemented Shannon-Fano algorithm on VB6 and on C, the C version was about 10 times faster, even after being turned into a DLLMain and called from there rather than on a command-line executable.
There are lots of COM DLLs that provide compression services, both open source and shareware, and some of them implement GZIP's deflate algorithm. It'd be really simple to just call one function from such a DLL from your VBA code to do the compression on your behalf.
I understand your being reluctant on using something external to your application, though in this case you might have to apply an exception for performance's sake.
In an effort to completely spoil your fun, examine file ZIPFLDR.DLL on windows\system32. you may also like to take a look at these links:
This has an example of how to do what you want (zipping using windows built-in ZIP capabilities) from VB.NET, it shouldn't be much different from VBA or VB6:
Transparent ZIP with DLL call
This one has a sample application on VB6 using windows built-in capabilities to zip (in ZIP rather than GZIP format, of course): Using Windows XP "Compressed Folder" shell extension to work with .zip files
Found both thru googling, you should be able to find more/better examples.
OK, I think I have an answer for you.
zlib is a library written by the guy that wrote the deflate algorithm you don't want to implement. There is a win32 DLL available. Here's the FAQ regarding using it from Windows:
http://www.zlib.net/DLL_FAQ.txt
Check out question 7. The authors don't seem too keen on Windows users, and don't seem at all keen on VB users, but as long as they're kind enough to provide the library we can do the rest.
If this is enough to help you, then great. If you want help with calling the C library from VBA add a comment and we'll figure it out. I haven't done any VB-to-C calls in years--it sounds like fun.
It seems that you want to open a bottle of wine but you definitly refuse to use a bottle-opener. As long as there is no VBA function allowing the GZipping of a file, you will not be able to do the job without some external ressource such as a dll or exe file.
If somebody wanted to compress files without relying on 3rd-party software they would generally implement it as a COM object/DLL so it would be available to more than just Excel. If somebody wanted to incorporate zip functionality into Excel they would use 3rd-party tools so they wouldn't have to re-implement the algorithm. So you're swimming against the tide. However...
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/SaveCopyAndZip.htm
There are two versions. The COM Add-in version "...allows you to zip any workbook that has been saved to disk (but it may be in an unsaved state)." It relies on a Moonlight Software component but all the components and set-up are contained in the installer. It's not quite public domain but the license is less restrictive than the GPL. The end result is an Excel add-in (that uses a 3rd-party component).
But if you really, truly don't want any dependencies on external tools you're either going to have to implement the compression algorithm yourself or wait until Microsoft builds that functionality into Windows and exposes it through Excel.
I hope this helps.
If you want to implement the algorithm in VBA, you would need to (in VBA) save the spreadsheet and then use VB's I/O functions to open the file, deflate it, and save it again. For all intents and purposes it's identical to writing an ordinary VB application that works on a file. You might need to put the VBA macro in a separate workbook to avoid "file in use" types of errors, but if you reopen the file as read-only and save it with a different filename you should be OK keeping everything in one workbook.
But I'm almost certain that shelling out to gzip from within the VBA would be functionally identical and infinitely easier.
EDIT: Some code. It didn't fail when I ran it, so it's OK to keep everything in the same workbook.
Sub main()
ActiveWorkbook.Save
Open "macrotest.xls" For Binary Access Read As #1
Open "newfile.zip" For Binary Access Write As #2
'do your stuff here
Close #2
Close #1
End Sub