I have found that VisioPS is able to draw diagram in xml from xml file using COM. Nice feature I can construct xml file and build diagram in visio. However for class diagram I need to add operations and attributes for classes. Is it possible to specify that information in xml file.
The link where information about visiops xml file is stored https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=1ff099edb1c7ebfa&id=1FF099EDB1C7EBFA%211421
Thanks in advance.
UPD
Link to the visio file with example: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/14767221/example.vsd
#misha - Thanks! now that I see what you are trying to accomplish it is easier to answer. The short answer is that the code in VisioPS is optimized around using the "basic" stencils (simple rectangular and oval shapes) and not stencils as complex as the UML stencils. The UML shapes are complicated and much harder for me to automate. I do think it is possible, and so I will take a look at how this could be added in future versions.
Related
Is there a way to get the raw XML text which another plugin has contributed to an extension point?
The normal way to access data that is contributed to an extension point is to use IConfigurationElement objects:
IConfigurationElement[] configElems = Platform.getExtensionRegistry()
.getConfigurationElementsFor(LANGUAGES_EXTENTION_POINT_ID);
But I already have JAXB parser for the kind of data that is contributed to this extension point. I'd like to use that one instead of Eclipse's classes.
EDIT 1: An alternative would be to use some kind of Eclipse-configuratoin-to-JAXB bridge library. But I don't find any.
EDIT 2: It's probably possible to find the plugin.xml of the contributing plug-in and read that manually... Probably not a good idea.
EDIT 3: I think I will do this: Instead of contributing the data directly clients get to give a file name. I then read that file using my old parser.
No, I don't see anything that would give you the XML.
getConfigurationElementsFor gives you information extracted from many different plugin.xml files so it is not clear what XML could be returned anyway.
org.eclipse.core.internal.registry.ExtensionRegistry is the extension registry implementation, but a lot of the information that uses comes from org.eclipse.core.internal.registry.RegistryObjectManager.
I'm using open-source BIRT and trying to generate government forms, like W-2s or 1099s (http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw2.pdf). These have government-mandated positions for text and grids, so that they're machine-readable. We currently use background images of the form layout and then lay the text over the form, but this yields high file sizes (multiple MBs) and doesn't seem optimal. Any ideas how to best accomplish this? Are there any repositories for this type of file (the rptdesign)? Thanks!
Answering the second part of your question. Are there any repositories for this type of file (the rptdesign)?
The optimal repository would be the BIRT DevShare http://developer.actuate.com/community/devshare
I searched there and did not find anything. If you wanted to create something and share it. That would be the best place.
Images will almost always be the worst in terms of file size. Can you start with non-image SVG representations of the forms?
I need a tool that I can use to get a better understanding of a large C
project. I'd like to be able to see the relationship between the various C
modules and what calls what, most used functions, what headers are used, etc.
I've searched here and Google but all the source code analysis tools seem to give
you the number of lines of code and other metrics that I'm not interested in. I just
want to get a high level view of how things are structured and interconnected before jumping into the code.
Does anything like this exist?
I've looked at these but they do not seem to do what I want: Source Code Tools
Since posting this I've tried Doxygen and it seems to give me some of what I need. Any others?
Try GNU cflow, that will analyze the call tree of the functions - you will nicely see the call hierarchy of the functions. Or browse the code with Eclipse.
Source Navigator may be helpful for some things (I used it to see call trees). See screenshots.
cxref builds annotated source code cross reference that's easy to view and navigate (I used to create HTML reference of some of my code). See cxref's output on its own source code here. Can be used to document the code.
It is not OSS, but the tool CppDepend can certainly help when it comes to understand a large legacy application written in C or C++.
Is there a utility out there that will create VB.NET classes from a Dataset.xsd file? And I don't mean like the XSD.exe utility does - all that does is convert the XML of an XSD file into classes in a .vb - it doesn't append any "extended" functionality.
I'm basically looking for something that will generate the beginnings of a business layer from the XSD file. Like creating a partial class for each datatable, then create a property for each of the datatable's columns as the right datatype and finally the basically CRUD methods as well.
This is something I have to do manually over and over again for each project. (I do lots of little projects and use VistaDB so I can't use Linq-To-SQL - wish I could)
I think that xsd.exe will do what you need it to. Here's and example to convert purchaseorder.xsd to a vb class in the Purchasing namespace:
xsd.exe -c -l:vb -n:Purchasing purchaseorder.xsd
Type xsd.exe /? from a visual studio command prompt to get all of the options.
You can find more info here.
Try taking a look at T4 and Code Generation tools in Visual Studio. It's like "writing code that writes code", and it's incredibly powerful.
A great video, really an "aha experience" for me
http://www.pnpguidance.net/Screencast/T4TemplatesVisualStudioCodeGenerationScreencast.aspx
MSDN:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb126445.aspx
Rob Conery has written an intro:
http://blog.wekeroad.com/blog/make-visual-studio-generate-your-repository/
... and so did Scott Hanselman:
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/T4TextTemplateTransformationToolkitCodeGenerationBestKeptVisualStudioSecret.aspx
I understand it's probably not exactly what you're hoping for, but when you want more flexibility and NOT having to write the same code over and over again, it really sounds like T4 could be a solution.
You'll write a template, that analyses your XSD file and generates the vb files directly in your project.
I know this doesn't strictly answer the question, but it looks like VistaDB either does, or will soon, have a provider that can be used with Linq to Entities - see here
Liquid studio XML Data Binder looks like it does what you want and has a 30 day trial you can download.
I want to be able to generate a highly graphical (with lots of text content as well) PDF file from data that I might have in a database or xml or any other structured form.
Currently our graphic designer creates these PDF files in Photoshop manually after getting the content as a MS Word Document. But usually, there are more than 20 revisions of the content; small changes here and there, spelling corrections, etc.
The 2 disadvantages are:
1) The graphic designer's time is unnecessarily occupied. The first version is the only one he/she should have to work on.
2) The PDF file becomes the document which now has the final revised content, and the initial content is out of sync with it. So if the initial content needs to be somewhere else (like on a website), we need to recreate it from the PDF file.
Generating the PDF file will help me solve both these problems. Perhaps some way in which the graphic designer creates a "Template" and then puts in tags/holders and maps these tags/holders to the relevant data.
Thanks :-)
There are some tools out there for doing this. XSL-FO is useful. Here is a tutorial for creating a pdf from xml (or xhtml) with cocoon. Also see Apache FOP.
You could format your SQL data as XML and still use the same templates this way.
I use the ReportLab python library for this. It could perhaps solve your problem, but you will need to do some work...
In the past I have written scripts that spit out LaTeX then used texi2pdf to solve this kind of problem.
Take a look at iReport and JasperReports at http://jasperforge.org.
iReport lets you design reports, and then you can either programatically fill it with the JasperReports library (Java), or just use iReport to manually create the report.
I have only used it for tabular data, but I don't think there would be any problem for other types of documents.
You could create a form and populate the entries programmatically using a pdf library like iText (Java).
You could look at doing the workflow in PostScript which is plain text that you can easily compose from fragments. Then you can use any free tool to convert to PDF.
Take a look at Prince XML. This tool allows to generate PDF based on XML or HTML and CSS.
A possible way is to use a template engine, like FreeMarker or StringTemplate: these are often used to generate HTML, but they are flexible enough to output any format, actually.
The problem is to make a PDF template, I suppose. Perhaps you can take a sample output and edit it to replace data with placeholders to be filled by the template engine. Might not be trivial!
Sounds like a job that SQL Server Reporting Services can handle quite easily.
Reporting Services allows you to query the data, define the layout, and export to PDF without any intervention. The PDF output can be distributed via email, stored on a file share, and accessed via a page on the report server.
It can handle XML data sources too.
Another approach to generating a PDF file from data is to use prawn, which is based on ruby. I was very pleasantly surprised by how much functionality is included in prawn. It may take some investment up front but this approach will give you a lot of flexibility.
You can combine CSStoXSLFO with XEP from RenderX for high quality output. With this solution you can merge XML data into an XHTML template, which is decorated with CSS. It can also generate charts with the fantastic JFreeChart library. CSS3 page media features are supported.