I have created one custom file type. Which will be YAML document but having a particular schema. This document is going to be a huge document, and generating this document is currently quite a pain for users.
I need to ease out the creation of the files for the users. Maybe custom plugin into existing IDEs like IntelliJ idea or Atom might help. This will enable user to
Code completion.
Syntax Highlighting
Adherence to particular to schema
What are the best and quick way to facilitate user with such tools? Any other tools/editors suggestions are welcome.
You can write a plugin for IntelliJ that gives you code highlighting, navigation, search and similar features.
It's quite complicated, so you need to understand:
intellij platform architecture and subsystems (virtual file system, project, document, events, etc)
intellij plugin development
ant-lr style code grammar
AST (code tree)
Here's some links to get started. It is possible, but the last time I did this it took upwards of 200 hours.
https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/plugin-development-guidelines.html
https://www.jetbrains.org/intellij/sdk/docs/basics/getting_started.html
Related
I want to build an application that displays the content that user types on the command prompt to the display like a presentation.
I am writing this application in golang. If there are existing libraries that I can use to do this great and if not would need direction how to approach solving this.
I did search on the internet for pointers but found none.
Have a look at the present tool, it does a similar thing using flat files and might even be useful for you.
https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/tools/present
I recently automated the creation of Powerpoint Presentations in a site I'm making. I found the Office Interop libraries extremely simple to use.
Office isn't built for this kind of thing in a webserver environment, so I'm looking at creating the Powerpoints using Open Office XML, only it's so extremely complex. For example I downloaded some code to create a blank presentation with some text. This code was around 300 lines! Using the Office Interop libraries I could do the same thing in just a couple of lines of code.
I don't have time, nor do I want to attempt to learn how to interact with the Open Office XML libraries, so I'm hoping someone has made a wrapper for the Open Office XML libraries. So far all my searching has only given me one result, Aspose Slides for .NET. This looks really hopeful, but it also looks rather expensive
Has anyone ever used a decent wrapper or alternative before?
If you are looking at automating the creation of Powerpoint presentation files, I'd say you continue with OpenXML, there's nothing better than it. Everything else is either paid or don't offer entire gamut of functionality that Open XML can provide.
If you find creating a blank file tedious, you could save an empty file somewhere and use that as a template for performing further operations on it.
The only thing close to a wrapper for PowerPoint I've found is the Open XML PowerTools. It includes a PresentationBuilder class which can be used for some specific tasks like combining slides from multiple PowerPoint documents into a new document. Although its pretty limited in its functionality you could extend the class.
However, I've come to the conclusion that there just is not a good wrapper out there so I've had to do what everybody pretty much recommends and that is using the Open XML SDK Productivity Tool and the Reflect code button.
I put together a basic presentation then Reflect Code and put that into a class. Yes its a lot of lines of code and its not the most elegant solution but it does work. Then from there I can extend or modify that class to do the specific things I need to do with each slide. The Productivity Tool is a big help for figuring out the code need to do specific things. I try to keep it simple and just do one or two things at a time, Reflect Code, then look at the code to see what it does.
You could try SoftArtisans PowerPointWriter, it has a template mode that allows you to start with an existing PowerPoint file with a few place holders, and merge your data with your presentation with as little as 5 lines of code.
Disclaimer: I work for SoftArtisans
I have many bundles (let's say hundreds) and it is quite difficult to specify relation between bundles+features-distrubutions in UI. Image, at first I define all relations between bundles, features and distribution. Than I want to update some bundles... it is almost impossible to find them in current implementation of UI. They are not groupped and one list of all bundles without any search bar is really hard to work with.
Is there any support for a file based solution. For example Apache ACE would watch a certain folder containing distribnution's bundles. When ever I make a change there, it would be propagate it to all targets.
There is currently no file based solution that matches what you describe, however, I think there are still a couple of solutions that might help you:
There are two types of associations between artifacts and features in ACE: static and dynamic ones. The latter can be of help to you, as they always automatically bind to the highest version of a bundle. So, once you've made all your associations, you can simply upload a set of newer bundles and the associations will adapt.
There is also a REST API you can use to programmatically talk to ACE. You can use that to further automate your process.
That said, you have a valid point that it is difficult to keep an overview when there are a lot of artifacts in the first column. I would advise you to watch, or even contribute to the following issues that were all created to improve this situation:
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ACE-319
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ACE-320
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ACE-321
I've just learned the hard way that Visual Studio 2010 and MSBuild extremely lenient when it comes to which vcxproj MSBuild files they will successfully execute - they will overlook missing configurations for subtasks and single files and still successfully execute the build tasks. However this is causing problems for me as it is leading to inconsistent builds across multiple configurations, plus due to the internal inconsistencies in the project files I cannot necessarily edit them in Visual Studio's property view.
So far I have managed to get rid of the most problematic inconsistencies by editing the vcxproj files by hand but this is not really an acceptable strategy given that this particular solution contains over 80 project files.
Is there a tool that can check an MSBuild file for internal consistency and highlight missing configurations along the lines of "your project files says it offers configurations X, Y and Z but the custom build task for file X only supports configurations X and Z"?
Update: The specific problem I am trying to solve right now as opposed to the more general problem of linting the vcxproj file is that of missing conditionals for certain configurations. Unfortunately adding and updating the conditionals seems to require a little more than I can safely accomplish using a find-and-replace tool. Doing it programmatically and correctly would most likely require DOM manipulation and given that I am rather familiar with the internal structure of the build files so far it appears that using a text editor that is able to do basic structural XML validation is the quickest way to accomplish the task at hand.
What I would really like to see however would be a tool that can at least highlight these problems automatically to cut down on the time spent tracking them down.
Configurations are, in general, a VS concept. They are not built-in to MSBuild but achieved using Conditional attributes on property groups. Most likely your project files are valid MSBuild projects, but some of them don't build with default parameters - I'd suggest not to edit them by hand, but either
use a find-and-replace tool to fix them
write a small app that uses Microsoft.Build.Construction API to inspect and fix the project files
There's nothing that would perform this for you, I'm afraid.
This request is currently tracked under https://github.com/dotnet/msbuild/issues/1777
This is not a real answer yet, but as soon as the issue gets resolved to a tangible solution, I'll update it here.
I'm building an app in Obj-C / Xcode and I'm running into some repetitive tasks. For example if I want to add an image resource to my project I just go through the same identical steps... only difference is the path to the resource.
How can I automate these tasks?
Is there some sort of Xcode macro-recorder like in Photoshop and Excel?
There's definitely no macro recorder, but there are some tools you can use. First, there's Applescript, which is the most likely to be of use for this particular problem. I'm not promising it'll be easy, however. There isn't a rich collection of Applescripts for Xcode that I know of, so you'd need to dig through the Scripting Suite using Script Editor and see what's available.
For text things, there are User Scripts, which you can create from the script menu (it looks like a scroll). You can write perl, python, ruby, or whatever you like to process selected text and turn it into other text.
You can also create text macros (Edit>Insert Text Macro).
Another major repetitive task is setting up your initial project. For that you can create new project templates to be set up as you like them. I have most of a walkthrough of that written up, and should have something posted on Cocoaphony this week or early next as part of my Building the Build System series.