Vista introduced an interface: IFileDialog::SetFilter, which allows me to setup a filter that will be called for every potential filename to see if it should be shown to the user.
Microsoft removed that in Windows 7, and didn't support it in XP.
I am trying to customize the our Open file dialog so that I can control which files are displayed to the end user. These files are marked internally with a product-code - there isn't anything in the filename itself to filter on (hence file extension filters are not useful here -= I need to actually interrogate each one to see if it is within the extra filter parameters that our users specified).
I would guess that Microsoft removed the SetFilter interface because too often it was too slow. I can imagine all sorts of similar ideas to this one which don't scale well for networks and cloud storage and what have you.
However, I need to know if there is an alternative interface that accomplishes the same goal, or if I really am restricted to only looking at the file extension for filtering purposes in my File dialogs?
Follow-up:
After looking further into CDN_INCLUDEITEM, which requires the pre-vista version of OPENFILENAME, I have found that this is the most useless API imaginable. It only filters NON-filesystem objects. In other words, you can't use it to filter files. Or folders. The very things one would filter 99.99% of the time for a file open or save dialog. Unbelievable!
There is a very old article by Paul DiLascia which offers the technique of removing each offending filename from the list view control each time the list view is updated.
However, I know from bitter experience that the list view can update over time. If you're looking at a large folder (many items) or the connection is a bit slow (heavily loaded server and/or large number of files), then the files are added to the dialog piecemeal. So one would have to filter out offending filenames repeatedly.
In fact, our current customized file open dialog uses a timer to look at the view's list of filenames periodically to see if any files of a given pattern exist, in order to enable another control. Otherwise it's possible to check for the existence of these files, find none, but a moment later the view updates to have more filenames, and no events are sent to your dialog to indicate that the view has been changed. In fact, my experience with having to write and maintain code for the common controls file dialogs over the years has been that Microsoft is not very cluefull when it comes to how to write such a thing. Events are incomplete, sent at not-useful times, repeated when not necessary, and whole classes of useful notifications don't exist.
Sadly, I think I might have to give up oh this idea. Unless someone has a thought as to how I might be able to keep up with the view spontaneously changing while the user is trying to interact with it (i.e. it would be awkward to go deleting out entries from the list view and changing the user's visual position, or highlighted files, or scroll position, etc.)
You need to initialise the callbacks for your CFileDialog. Then you need to process CDN_INCLUDEITEM notification code to include or exclude items.
You can also check this great article. The author uses some other approaches in addition to callbacks
As you have already discovered, starting in Windows 7 it is no longer possible to filter out files from being displayed based on content, only file extension. You can, however, validate that the user's selected file(s) are acceptable to you before allowing the dialog to close, and if they are not then display a message box to the user and keep the dialog open. That is the best you will be able to do unless you create your own custom dialog.
Related
We update content control for every character typed in the task pane’s input field. So that user can see the live updates on the word document.
Recently we added functionality for locking content controls. And it happens as below:
User input (types a character) in a input field
We search a content control for that input field (involves context.sync)
Unlock the content control (involves context.sync)
Update value in content control (involves context.sync)
Lock back the content control (involves context.sync)
All this works nice in Word for windows without problems.
But is extremely (visibly) slow with Word for Mac (apple machines)
How should I overcome the delays happening on Mac?
As Juan mentioned in the comment, there are some important details that the team would need to investigate. Sample code would be good too.
That being said, just looking at what you describe, I think you can dramatically cut down on the context.sync() statements. Unlocking the content control, updating its value, and locking it should all be possible to do in one sync.
I have a bunch of details about minimizing sync-s in my book, "Building Office Add-ins using Office.js. Quoting one of the sections from it:
As an add-in author, your job is to minimize the number of context.sync()
calls. Each sync is an extra round-trip to the host application; and when
that application is Office Online, the cost of each of those round-trip adds up
quickly.
If you set out to write your add-in with this in principle in mind, you will
find that you need a surprisingly small number of sync calls. In fact, when
writing this chapter, I found that I really needed to rack my brain to come up with a scenario that did need more than two sync calls. The trick for
minimizing sync calls is to arrange the application logic in such a way that
you're initially scraping the document for whatever information you need
(and queuing it all up for loading), and then following up with a bunch
of operations that modify the document (based on the previously-loaded
data). You've seen several examples of this already: one in the intro chapter,
when describing why Office.js is async; and more recently in the "canonical
sample" section at the beginning of this chapter. For the latter, note that the
scenario itself was reasonably complex: reading document data, processing
it to determine which city has experienced the highest growth, and then
creating a formatted table and chart out of that data. However, given the
"time-travel" superpowers of proxy objects, you can still accomplish this task
as one group of read operations, followed by a group of write operations.
Still, there are some scenarios where multiple loads may be required. And in
fact, there may be legitimate scenarios where even doing an extra sync is the
right thing to do – if it saves on loading a bunch of unneeded data. You will
see an example of this later in the chapter.
I want to write an Xcode extension that scans the source code for particular code fragments. However, it seems that such extension would work only on a per-file basis. For example, here you can see that upon pushing a button only the current source file is changed. Is there a way to scan multiple source files at once?
I am afraid it is not possible yet. As if you see the documentation in here
https://developer.apple.com/reference/xcodekit
the Framework has really a little few Classes, which none of them indicates multiple files... As you can see, you can edit text from Buffer from current opened tab in Xcode, which makes it a little bit complicated. The buffer can be used only in context of file (imagine hell of 10000000 lines of code loading into buffer and manipulating with such text) I believe in future apple will extend this to the max, but for now, we must be happy with what we have... Sorry for disappointing news.
I want to make a program for a very catered, specific purpose, to aid me in making a large set of quest mods to the videogame Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. I’m attempting to do this through either excel or Visual Basic, and here I’ve provided a little summary of how dialogue works in the game’s normal creation program and then what I want to create outside of it and improve on.
How Morrowind Dialogue works?
For those of you who may be familiar with the game, you’ll remember that the talking to NPC’s will bring up a set of text, and this text is their dialogue. There are different “topics” that if an NPC has dialogue set for, the player can see the topic and click on it, bringing up a new wall of text, and this is generally how dialogue works in the entire game on the player’s end.
In creating a Morrowind Mod, the way dialogue really works in the “Construction Set” (the program used to create and edit the game) is that a database contains every entry of text, and this these entries have conditions set to them which limit which NPCs can say a given entry of dialogue. So for instance, a topic like “latest rumors”, will have lots of entries in it with lots of different NPCs having something to say about it. The topic itself is a condition of sorts with potentially dozens of entries attached to it, and conditions set to specific entries can also be applied. Conditions can include checking to see if the NPC is in a given city, if the in-game time is night or day, if the player is at a certain numbered stage/index of a given quest line and much, much more. This system is what makes all quests possible and the game dynamic.
What I want to create:
I am beginning a rather large mod project that includes many entries of dialogue, many new and old topics, and many quest and quest stages. I could list all the reasons here but essentially my problem is that the Construction Set has many limitations in terms of organization that make it difficult to make a large mod’s dialogue in. I would be better off to design, set the topics for, and edit all of my dialogue entries outside of the Construction Set program and implement them when I’m confident that the writing and quests are finished.
Essentially if this is too complicated I could just write all the quests and dialogue in Microsoft Word, but optimistically I'd like to do something more dynamic and helpful to me, as a writer, and be able to use real variables to store and set Journal/Quest Indexes, filter dialogue by Quest or by NPC, and easily edit dialogue and quests without getting lost in the normal game’s thousands of lines of other dialogue.
*I can't post more than two links here, but I posted on reddit and there I have a gallery showing how the Construction Set works and what I have made in Visual Studio so far:
https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/4oap6w/making_an_application_in_visual_basic_to_handle/
So, my intention is to make a program in Visual Studio using Visual Basic or Python that leaves me with a program that lets me write, organize, and set the text for dialogue and filter based on conditions.
This likely requires creating a database file for the program in Visual Studio and being able to create variables in runtime, for the program. That is because I want the user of the program to be able to add new dialogue topics, new journal/quests, and all of these things will have conditions with values associated with them.
Any help, advice, and direction is appreciated. I am relearning Visual Studio (I took two courses in it) and I am unfortunately very new to excel and databases in general.
You are correct in that a database of some kind would be needed. However, you could approach this several different ways depending upon your comfort level, money, portability requirements, etc...
One way to do it would be to use XML to store your data. It has the advantage of being extremely portable and transformable. Since this is likely a program where only one person would be directly accessing the data at any given time, it might be your best bet.
Another option is to use MS Access if you have office. This gives you a workable, albeit fairly basic, relational database. This would probably be a better choice if you have 2 or 3 people that could possibly be working in it.
A third option would be a full DBMS. MySQL is free and you could install that to your local machine, or to a remote server. Installed to a remote server would give you the option of allowing many people to connect to it and modify data transactionally. However, this would be overkill if it is only a one or two person system.
Circling back around to XML... That will most likely be your best bet. It is simple and integrates perfectly with .Net applications. It can be imported/transformed to any data-store later once you are finished (or multiple times as you progress). Interfacing with XML via .Net allows you to work with it like a database within your code, so if you design your data layer properly up front, you could even migrate to a full database later if the project expands drastically. The biggest downside to XML would be that it isn't relational in the way that a regular DBMS is, and it is not inherently transactional. You do not have atomic updates, so if you have several people modifying things at once you could lose data if it is overwritten.
You could get around that to an extent by writing a more advanced data layer to interface with the XML files, but if only one person is making changes locally, and then the data file is, say, uploaded to a remote datastore later, the only thing to keep in mind would be coordinating when and who can modify that file. Mostly logistics stuff at that point.
We have a small team running StarTeam. A constant source of frustration and problems is the handling of deleted files in StarTeam. It is obvious that Starteam keeps track of deleted files internally, but it does not seem to be possible to get any information about a file deletion.
So far, my only solution to find the timing of a delete is to perform a manual binary search using the 'compare' views. Is there any better way (the query for 'delete time' never seems to pick up any files).
The Audit tab (just to the right of File, ChangeRequest, etc.) is probably your best bet if you're just looking for who deleted what and when. The Audit tab also provides information about when items and folders were created, shared, or moved, as well as when View labels are attached/detached. Whenever someone has files unexpectedly appear or disappear, I direct them to the Audit tab first.
There is a server-side configuration setting for the length of time the audit data is retained (30 days by default, I believe). Since it is not retained forever, it isn't a good option for historical data. The number of audits can be quite large in active views.
If you're looking for something more than that or older than your audit retention time, go with Bubbafat's suggestion of the SDK and getDeletedTime/getDeletedUserID.
Comparing views (or rolling back a view to see the item again) is the only way I know how to do this in StarTeam without writing code.
If you are willing to write a little code the StarTeam API provides the Item.getDeletedTime and Item.getDeletedUserId methods (I believe these showed up in 2006).
I'm looking for advanced strategies for dealing with User Object Handle limits when building heavy-weight windows interfaces. Please explain how you overcame or bypassed this issue using SWT or direct Windows GUI APIs. The only thing I am not interested in is strategies to optimize widget usage as I have done this extensively and it does not solve the problem, only makes it less likely.
My Situation:
I have an SWT based GUI that allows for multiple sessions within the same parent shell and within each session their are 3 separate places where a list of user generated comments are displayed. As a user opens multiple sessions and pulls data that populates those lists, the number of user object handles can increase dramatically depending on the number of comments.
My current solutions:
1. I page the comments by default thereby limiting the number of comment rows in each session, but due to management demands, i also have what is effectively a "View All" button which bypasses this completely.
2. I custom draw all non-editable information in each row. This means each row utilizes only 2 object handles.
3. I created JNI calls which query the OS for the current usage and the Max usage. With this i can give indications to users that a crash is imminent. Needless to say, they ignore this warning.
First off, are you sure the problem isn't desktop heap vs. handle count? Each handle can consume a certain amount of Windows desktop heap. One USER handle may eat a lot of space, some very little. I'm suggesting this to make sure you're not chasing user handle counts when it's really something else. (google for Microsoft's dheapmon tool, it may help)
I've read that you can alter the maxes on handles by changing keys in the registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\
CurrentVersion\Windows\ USERProcessHandleQuota and GDIProcessHandleQuota
This could be a short term fix for users.
I'd approach this by first figuring out what 2 user handles need to be maintained for each item (like 2 for each item in a listbox?). This seems suspect. User handles are for only a few top-level Windows UI objects (Windows, menus, cursors, Window positions, icons, etc...). I don't see why your widget needs to keep 2 objects around for each item (is it an icon handle??).
If you're looking to rip the whole thing apart - this sounds like a job for a virtual-mode List-View (LVS_OWNERDATA).
You should think about using windowless controls. They are designed for precisely this situation. See "Windowless controls are not magic", by Raymond Chen
Not only top-level windows, but most native controls use one user object each. See Give Me a Handle, and I'll Show You an Object for an in-depth explanation of user- and other handle types. This also means that SWT uses at least one user handle per widget, even for a Composite.
If you truly are hitting the limit of 10000 user objects per process, and you don't have a leak, then your only option is to reduce the number of widget instances in your application. I wrote a blog article about how we did this for our application.