I'm trying to figure out how to do this as I'm not sure what's the proper way of doing this.
I've got several strings that I want to store/save permanently, even after the application is closed. How should I proceed? Do I read or write from a textfile?
I believe you're looking for a feature known as Application Settings. This feature will take care of storing settings between instances of the application. The manner in which it stores settings is ClickOnce and User aware so it takes much of the problems out of the picture.
Here's a link to an overview on the topic
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/c9db58th(VS.80).aspx
Use My.Settings
Yes, you might store it in a simple text file or use a settings file.
Take a look at Application Settings:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/0zszyc6e.aspx
I store what I need in a plain text file. I use my own format: First line: lenght of the array or the number of bytes/lines the data needs to be stored. Second line: data types. third line: directories or path info. At the end I store the data.
That's because programming languages can read by characters or by lines. C++ considers either whitespaces and lines.
SQL or Access is when you need to store more complex data than just strings or arrays.
Yes, I'd store it in some form of text file, then you can read it on load. It's very easy to implement in Visual Basic and you might even find some samples in Codemonkeys or similar. I'd avoid using the registry. Of course if you want, you could also use some sort of database (Access, SQLITE, etc.) to store the values. But that depends upon the type of data and how much do you need to read/write from it.
yes you can write to a text file, or try SQLite, which can let your VB program have database capabilities.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=visual+basic+sqlite&btnG=Search
Related
When am trying to open any .EXE file am getting information in encoded form. Any idea how to see the content of an .EXE file ????
I need to know what Database tables are used in the particular .EXE.
Ah, now we are getting closer to the real question.
It is probably much more productive to ask the targeted databases about the SQL queries being execute during the run, or a top-ten shortly afterwards.
The table-names might not be hard-coded recognizably as such in the executable.
They might be obtained by a lookup, and some fun pre-fixing or other transformation might be in place.
Admittedly they like are clear text.
Easiest is probably to just transfer to a Unix server and use STRINGS on the image.
I want to include the source here with but that failed, and I cannot find how to attach a file. Below you'll find a link OpenVMS macro program source for a STRINGS like tool. Not sure how long the link will survive.
Just read for instructions, save (strings.mar), compile ($ MACRO strings), link ($link strings), and activate ($ mcr sys$login:strings image_to_test.exe)
OpenVMS Macro String program text
Good luck!
Hein
Use analyze/image to view the contents of an executable image file.
I'm guessing you are trying to look in the EXE because you do not have access to the source. I do something like this:
$ dump/record/byte/hex/out=a.a myexe.exe
Then look at a.a with any text editor (132 columns). The linker groups string literals together, and they are mostly near the beginning of the EXE, so you don't have to look to far into the file. Of course this only helps if the database references are string literals.
The string literal might be broken across a block (512 byte) boundary, so if you use search in your editor, try looking for substrings.
Aksh - you are chasing your tail on this one. Its a false dawn. Even if you could (and you can't) find the database tables, you will need the source of the .exe to do anything sensible with it, or the problem you are trying to solve. Its possible to write a program which just lists all the tables in a database without reading any of 'em. So you could spend and awful lot of effort and get nowhere. Hope this helps
I resort to your expertly advice because I am sort of "new" to Objective-C, I have read a couple of books and docs (namely Aaron Hillegass & Stephen G. Kochan's books), but some things are still unclear to me, for lack of practise.
To put you in context, I have a NSDocument project that uses Core Data for storage.
I struggle with 2 things right now: reading/writing to files, and table views ^^
So my first question is about Core Data : is it only able to save in SQL, XML or Binary format ?
Or can I use core data to read/write in any format, according to what I declared in the plist file ?
I am trying to work with .po files, and I want to display the translations in a table view containing 2 columns (1 for the msgid and the other for the msgstr).
To read and write files in the po format and display lines in my table view, I most likely need to parse the files using line endings and characters such as "#"as delimiters.
I haven't gotten around to doing that yet (I have no idea how to do that yet!), but I would like to know if it is possible or if I need to restart my project that doesn't use Core Data...
Please DO NOT just throw links to the apple documentation at me, it's the most confusing thing ever, and feels like it's made for experts only! I need me some human-readable explanations :)
Thanks a bunch for any help and advice you can give me!
It is possible to write a different storage format for Core Data, but it is not easy and it sounds like you are not at a level where that is a possibility (no shame there, I'm not either).
If you are only displaying data from the .po files then there is no need to use CoreData. CoreData is meant to provide a file storage solution. You create/edit data and save it using coredata. If you have no intention to create and edit data then get rid of coredata, it will only get in the way.
I'm fairly new to VB.NET, and I've mainly been doing ASP programming up 'til now, and I have a pretty simple question.
I'm creating a program that will copy a selected file to a selected directory, and I want to store recent files/dirs so that they can be selected from a combo box. I was planning to just create a settings with "files" and "dirs", and just store the strings as | separated values (since that's an illegal file character).
Is there anything wrong with this approach, or are there any better methods?
I think your approach is fine as it seems to be simply a local cache of recent directories. You can persist the data in the application at the module level(create a module with a public object essentially is a global variable) but it goes away when the application is terminated.
This article is using a similar approach to what you were thinking although the example is in C#
I'm writing a quick front end to display guitar tablature. The front end is in Flash but I want to store the tab in some human-readable format. Anyone know of something that already exists? Any suggestions on how to go about it? One idea I got from reading some stackoverflow posts was to use a strict ASCII tab format like so:
e||-1------3--------------0--|----2-------0---
B||--1-----3------------1----|----3-------0---
G||---2----0----------0------|----2-------1---
D||----3---0--------2--------|----0-------2---
A||----3---2------3----------|------------2---
E||----1---3----3------------|------------0---
It has advantages. I can gain a lot of info from the structure (how many strings, their tunings, the relative placement of notes) but it is a bit verbose. I'm guessing the '-'s will compress away pretty well when sent over the wire.
If anyone knows of an existing data-format for describing guitar tab I'll take a look as well.
edit:
I should note that this format is 90% for me and may not ever been seen by anyone other than myself. I want an easy way to write tab files that will be displayed eventually as graphics in a Flash front-end and I don't want to have to write an editor front end.
Check out the ASCII tab format. Also great description of the format is here:
http://www.howtoreadguitartabs.net/
ASCII export would be a great feature, but using ASCII as internal data format is not a good idea. For example, note durations would be extremely hard to express (hou would you store 32nds or even 16ths?, not to mention triplets...), so parsing those files would be extremely difficult. Moreover, users would be tempted to load ASCII files created outside your app, which will be likely to fail.
To sum up, i'd recommend to either try to reuse existing format or invent your own if that's not feasible. You may try to use XML for that.
EDIT: Beside DGuitar, i know of TuxGuitar and KGuitar, which support Guitar Pro files. You can look into their sources or ask their authors about file formats. I think there is also open source PowerTab-to-ASCII converter.
See Supported file formats in TuxGuitar.
TuxGuitar is open-source multiplatform software for reading, writing and playing the guitar tabs.
It supports the mentioned Guitar Pro and PowerTab format, and it also has its own TuxGuitar (.tg) format.
If you need the backend data structure to remain in human readable form I would probably stick it in a CDATA inside of XML. That could be inserted into a relational database with song/artist/title information and become searchable. Another option is to save it as zipped text files and insert links to those files in a database with the main artist info still searchable by sql.
These are not human readable:
Most common formats are Guitar Pro (proprietary) and PowerTab (freeware). DGuitar and TuxGuitar are open source viewers for Guitar Pro format. I'm sure that they have documentation for the format somewhere (at least in the code).
Advantage for using a common format would be the easiness of making tabs with those programs.
The Guitar Pro 4 format is described here http://dguitar.sourceforge.net/GP4format.html
I wrote a quick utility for displaying tab. For personal use. You can happily take the internal format I used.
I use a very simple string based format. There are three important structures.
Column, a vertical column in the output tab - all notes played simultaneously.
Bar, a collection of Columns
Motif, a collection of Bars
A Column looks like ':#|:#|*:#' where each * is a string number and each # is a fret number. If you are playing a chord you separate each string:fret with a '|'
A Bar looks like '[,,-,*]' where each * is a Column. A - indicates an empty column where no notes are played.
A Motif looks is just many Bars running back to back. For instance
"[1:5,-,3:7,-,3:5,-,3:7,-,-,3:5,3:7,-,1:8,-,1:5]"
e||---------------|---------------||
B||---------------|---------------||
G||---------------|---------------||
D||--7-5-7--57----|--7-5-7--57----||
A||---------------|---------------||
E||5-----------8-5|5-----------8-5||
"[-,-,1:3|2:2|3:0|4:0|5:3|6:3,-,-][-,-,3:0|4:2|5:3|6:2,-,-]"
e||--3--|--2--||
B||--3--|--3--||
G||--0--|--2--||
D||--0--|--0--||
A||--2--|-----||
E||--3--|-----||
I am maintaining an old VB6 application, and would like to include SQL scripts directly in part of the project. The VB6 application should then extract the text of this script and execute it on the server.
The reasons for this approach are various - among others, we want to deliver only an updated executable rather than a complete update/installation package. Hence, the SQL scripts need to be compiled into the application just like a resource file. And, obviously, one has to be able to get at the content from code, in order to send it to the database server.
Does anyone have a good way to do this?
The simplest solution is to just create a VB module with the scripts as strings.
If you want to use a resource file instead, you can do that too. You can associate a resfile with a VB project (I don't remember how to do this directly in the VB IDE but the VBP file supports a ResFile32 parameter).
EDIT: It seems like the issue here is mostly about formatting -- you don't want to store SQL queries as one long string, but formatting the query nicely inside VB is tedious because you have to add quotes, add string concatenation operators to join the lines together, etc.
I would recommend placing the SQL in a text file and formatting it in whatever way you like. Write a script that will take the text and convert it into a VB module. The build process would be modified to always apply this script first before compiling the application.
For scripting, use your favorite scripting language; if you don't have a favorite scripting language, this is an easy enough task that you could do it in VB, C#, or any other language. If it were me, I'd probably use awk (gawk) or Python.
If you want to use a resource (.RES) to store your SQL, go to the menu:
Add-ins > Add-in Manager...
and select VB 6 Resource Editor. Configure the add-in to be loaded and to load at startup.
From the editor add-in, VB provides a simple interface to add resource strings. You will refer to these using the provided constant values. To load the strings at runtime, use the LoadResString function:
Public Const SQL_INSERT As Integer = 101
Dim strSQL As String
strSQL = LoadResString(SQL_INSERT)
(replace "101" with the constant value of the string you wish to load)
Just another thought on your approach. Because I find myself tweaking the program's behavior or UI for customers I might be in the middle of a change that either is not ready or has not yet been tested and approved. So if I have properties that change from time to time, but I want to maintain control of, for instance connection settings to our ftp server, I will create a resource only dll exposing my properties and use a resource file in the dll to supply the values. When my network manager changes something on the ftp server I change the strings in the resource maanger, recompile the dll and release just the updated dll. I'm sure there are many more solutions, but that is how I do it. If you don't think you might have to change your SQL scripts at the same time you are changing you exe this probably only complicates your work. It has worked well enough for me that now this is pretty much standard for me.