How to extract data from a .tps topscan Clarion file? - clarion

I have to make a MySQL database from a Clarion database. The tables are .tps files.
I don't know how to do it, for now I only found applications that work with .dat files.

I made an open-source bulk tps-to-csv conversion utility.
Its based on reverse engineering the TPS file format, so make sure you double check the results. The source (Java) can be found is available on github.

If you have a copy of Clarion, you should have the topscan.exe utility. It has an export feature.

Related

Updating the version info of a CHM file during compile with Inno [duplicate]

I need to add version info and retrieve it from the CHM file to make it possible to make an alert message to a user about a new CHM-file version available and downloaded.
It means, that I should compare versions of CHM on different machines (Server and clients).
The other way is date and time checking, but I should remember about time zones, so this is complicated, because also one should remember about different file systems, according to Windows SDK help about SetFileTime function and FILETIME structure.
If someone knows the trick - please share.
.chm files don't have version information. You will need to find some alternative way to mark the file version.
One way that occurs to me is to include a topic in the help file that contains the version. I imagine that this topic would be hidden, that is not linked by any other topic, not in the table of contents, etc.
All that remains is for your application to be able to read that topic from the help file. I'm sure that can be done with a .chm file parser, if you can obtain one. Perhaps more easily you can get the platform browser to read the topic for you. You can use IHTMLDocument2 to read a URI like this:
mk:#MSITStore:C:\somedir\somefile.chm::/html/SomeTopic.html

How to open spss data files in Excel?

I want to open spss .sav data files in Excel without opening the spss files (I don't want to convert spss data file into Excel file). I know this is possible using OLDB connection, but I don't know how to do this.
I converted sav to csv online: http://pspp.benpfaff.org/
(Not exactly an answer for you, since do you want avoid opening the files, but maybe this helps others).
I have been using the open source GNU PSPP package to convert the sav tile to csv. You can download the Windows version at least from SourceForge [1]. Once you have the software, you can convert sav file to csv with following command line:
pspp-convert <input.sav> <output.csv>
[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/pspp4windows/files/?source=navbar
In order to download that driver you must have a license to SPSS. For those who do not, there is an open source tool that is very much like SPSS and will allow you to import SAV files and export them to CSV.
Here's the software
And here are the steps to export the data.
I help develop the Colectica for Excel addin, which opens SPSS and Stata data files in Excel. This does not require ODBC configuration; it reads the file and then inserts the data and metadata into your worksheet.
The addin is downloadable from
http://www.colectica.com/software/colecticaforexcel
You can do it via ODBC. The steps to do it:
Install IBM SPSS Statistics Data File Driver. Standalone Driver is enough.
Create DNS via ODBC manager.
Use the data importer in Excel via ODBC by selecting created DNS.
You can use online converter, developed by me at N'counter.
This is the easiest way to open SPSS file in Excel.
1) You just have to upload your file to SPSS coN'verter at https://secure.ncounter.de/SpssConverter
2) Select some options
3) And your converted Excel file will be downloaded
No information about your file contents is retained on our server. The file travels to our server, is converted in-memory, and is immediately discarded: We don't peer into your data at any time!
I tried the below and it worked well,
Install Dimensions Data Model and OLE DB Access
and follow the below steps in excel
Data->Get External Data ->From Other sources -> From Data Connection Wizard -> Other/Advanced-> SPSS MR DM-2 OLE DB Provider-> Metadata type as SPSS File(SAV)-> SPSS data file in Metadata Location->Finish

Parsing Excel files in monotouch

Are there any good ways of parsing Excel files in monotouch? Seems like most methods to work with Excel is based on using the Excel Object Library. Doesn't seem like that's even an option in monotouch? I read that objective-c doesn't have any native support for Excel-files, so don't know if that would change anything?
You would need to either
write your own
find an obj-c library that does it and write MT bindings for it
find a open source .NET library and port it to MT
If all you want to do is display a file, you can use the existing iOS document APIs to do it.
The newest Office formats are XML based, so depending on how complex the files are, writing your own parser might be feasible to do.
I ended up just writing the middle step, a web service that fetches the Excel file, parses it and serves up the content as xml/json.

How to read an Open Office spreadsheet?

How can I read an Open Office 3.0 spreadsheet (.ods) from Groovy? I'd like to select specific columns from a named worksheet. Ideally, it would be useful to add a 'where' clause, or other criteria clause.
I've never used it, but Open Office has a Java API, which of course you could use from Groovy as well. It looks like the best places to start reading are the Developer's Guide, the Java UNO Reference, and the samples in Java and (hey!) Groovy. Hope that helps!
Might be something here at Spring Factories or here at Groovy and JMX. There is a forum for Groovy and Open Office.
Could you export the table / spreadsheet as SQL entries then use that. You could also look at this plugin for goovy -- http://www.ifcx.org/
OpenOffice documents are ZIP files which contains the document data as XML plus some other files (style sheets for word documents). Details can be found here.
The main problem with calc is formulas. If you just have tabular data, then you can simply read the cell values and use that. So you can open the ZIP archive, read the content.xml in it and parse that with any XML parser.
But when a cell contains a formula, then you need to execute it. In this case, you will have to open the document via the UNO API. Here is the Java version. There is a link where you can download example code that explains how to open ODF documents and how to examine their content. There are also snippets but none of them show how to examine a sheet.
The main disadvantage of UNO is the documentation. Each method is explained somewhere but you have to find the method which solves your problem, first.
Since the title does not mention Groovy (only question specifics does), I didn't want to make this a new question.
How to generally read an Open Office spreadsheet document? There are tools for creating one (ooo-python) but not for reading one. They are XML but just bluntly diving into that and trying to get the right logic of extracting the data I want seems so sub-optimal.
What I'd like is features similar to Excel COM support, but from a command line tool (or scripting language).

How best to export native data to Excel without introducing dependency on Office?

Our product has the requirement of exporting its native format (essentially an XML file) to Excel for viewing/editing. However, what this entails is having a dependency on Excel (or Office) itself for our product build - something that we do not want.
What we have done is export the data from our native format to a csv file which can be opened in Excel. If user selects an option to open the generated report as well, we (try to) launch Excel application to open it (ofcourse it requires Excel to be already present on the client system).
The data for most part is flat list of records.
Is there a better format (or even a better way) to handle this requirement? This is a common requirement for many products - how do you handle this?
Excel versions, both 2007 and several previous, have native XML formats. 2007, obviously, is XML by default, and earlier versions have the ability to save as XML. This SO question deals with the issue. I'd guess a little inspection would give an idea of what's required. I don't know if a XSD/DTD exists for older versions, but a little creative Googling might yield something.
As other people pointed out, it is reasonably easy to generate Excel XML files. You can do this in multiple ways. For example:
By creating a template Excel XML document, and then using XML DOM to stuff your data into the template, or
Converting the template Excel XML into an XSLT, and then simply passing your proprietary XML as input to XSLT.
I'm using ExcelPackage to create spreadsheets in one of my side projects. Works pretty good, but (at least the version I'm using) its a bit limited when it comes to styling and calculations.
ExcelPackage lets you create OOXML docs (.xslx files) that are natively compat with 2k7, but you can download a plugin for previous versions of Office from MS.
We export our data either using Excel objects (COM based code) on client side or CSV file (usually on server side, but can be used on client side too). And we allow copy data from grids in simple html format, what can be pasted into Excel without problems.
For one customer we even had to export data [from sql stored procedure] into csv-like tab-separated format, but named file like xxxxx.xls - this way excel opened that file in more correct way than csv file. Ugly hack, but worked well.
CSV is most compatible format (no dependencies on external applications or libraries), but customers don't like it. Maybe we need to incorporate some XLS export code, this way all users will be happy :)
If .csv isn't formatted enough, you could create a template in Excel, and use a little bit of VBA code to import the CSV and format it appropriately. This way your app is only concerned with generating the .CSV, and will use the same .XLS for each export.
If you're careful, you should be able to get this to work with most versions of Excel seamlessly.
With Perl there are several modules that can be used to produce .xlsx files without requiring an Office installation. Among those :
https://metacpan.org/pod/Excel::Writer::XLSX is the most well-known, with support for many Excel features like colors, formatting, etc.
https://metacpan.org/pod/Excel::ValueWriter::XLSX (I'm actually the author) has less features but is optimized for fast writing of large amounts of data
If you are working in Java, Checkout the POI project from APACHE.
http://poi.apache.org/
Simple, nice, complete, powerful.
We started with Office on the server, but that's not very nice. We had to kill processes that hung, and had quite a bit of a performance dip. We thought about putting it on a different machine, but didn't bother after trying and using Aspose (commercial). We don't have a very large number of simultaneous users, but complex documents. Simple ones can be handled easier with csv.
I've used FlexCel Studio for a couple of projects now. It's very functional and fast. 100% managed code, no dependencies. Sounds like you'd use the "Reports" feature which allows you to define an empty report template in Excel, then pass datatable and volia, it's populated with your data.
TMS Software
We use a combination of OleDB and Interop. We found that Interop was much faster and used less memory, but it's a pain for compatibility issues, especially when using different language installs of Office.
OleDb has the advantage that you don't require Excel to be installed on the client machine. Both Interop and OleDb support multiple sheets (tables) per workbook which you cannot do with csv.
If you're using C# or VB.Net, and your data is in a a DataSet, DataTable or List<>, then you can use my free "Export to Excel" class.
It uses the free Microsoft OpenXML libraries (so you don't need to have Excel on your server), and lets you export your data into a "real" .xlsx file with just one line of code, eg:
DataSet ds = CreateSampleData();
CreateExcelFile.CreateExcelDocument(ds, "C:\\Sample.xlsx");
All source code is provided on the following page along with a demo project, completely free of charge (and popups !)
http://mikesknowledgebase.com/pages/CSharp/ExportToExcel.htm
Hope this helps !

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