I do some Word automation filling in the blanks in some Word documents which are used as templates.
One template is used more often than the others, and this causes the error, as it locks out and Word is unable to open it, though I wish to open it in read only.
Opening the document
do until lole_word.Documents.Count = 0
lole_word.Documents[1].Close(lole_word.SaveOptions.wdDoNotSaveChanges)
loop
boolean lb_readOnly
lb_readonly = true
lole_word.Documents.Open(as_fileIn, lb_readOnly)
The problem is that the template document is opened once, with no flaws of any kind. But when the same template has to be reused, although the lole_word.Documents.Count always returns 0, when Word opens the previously used template, it is locked out, and Word finally shows up asking me whether I want to open it in read only mode.
I wish to avoid this annoyance and simply open the file in read only mode, as it shall be saved elsewhere once it is filled in.
My problem is that even though I specify open in read only mode by setting the second parameter to true, Word doesn't seem to see it this way and still pops up his File Already in Use by Another User dialog, and then my application loses control over Word and it crashes.
We had a similar problem and I wish that I could remember how we solved it. We may have used the Quit command. I know that we also did an attempted FileOpen in exclusive mode (with no intention of using the file) and immediately closing it. If we got a file locked return code we prompted the user to close out of excel first because there were times they would have the program open outside of OLE. I know this isn't exactly what you were looking for but hope it leads you somewhere. I recall this being an intermittent problem and there were some cases users had to open task manager and kill the extraneous excel process.
I vaguely remember the locking being caused by the file system and not Word, as we were opening in read only as well.
Related
I've compiled my first web crawler script with AppleScript and I'm at the point now where I've gained a lot of knowledge and tricks from what I've written. I want to parse down the script now and disable some things that I thought would be helpful (for example: I coded it so the script completely quits Excel after entering the data in some workbooks from web pages because I noticed when you didn't start Excel fresh running the code it would return an error. But now I have the script running every 15 minutes so I worry that I will be working in Excel on some forecasting or formatting and the script will run and kick me out of Excel while I'm working and interrupt me or worse, quit without the option of saving). I vaguely remember C++ coding there was the ability to mark some text with a certain character that disabled it from running in the environment but made it so you could still see the original code before editing out stuff you decided wasn't necessary. Is there a way to mark a certain statement with a symbol so that AppleScript doesn't run the commands? I haven't experimented at all but I don't know what to guess that would do it. I may be mistaken that you can blank out or "white out" text while leaving it in the original position, still readable and able to be put back in when you want it or left for you so you have a collection of all the research you put into the process of building a script for a project. Well I suppose I'll just wonder a while and find something else to burn hours on.
In applescript there are three ways to "comment" out text in your code.
--A line beginning with two dashes is a comment.
#In applescript 2.+, the number sign also works as a comment symbol.
(* Multi-line text
can be commented out
using these symbols. *)
I have a Win32 program that keeps a file open and writes data to it over a period of several hours. I'd like for the file size, as shown in an Explorer window, to be updated every so often.
As an example, when a browser is downloading a large file, you can see the file size change over time, even though the file is still downloading.
With my current naive implementation, the file size remains zero until I close the file.
How do I do this in Win32? Currently the file is open using std::ofstream. Is this a proper application of std::ostream::flush() ? Or do I need to close and reopen the file with some regularity?
std::ostream::flush() makes sure you have your data safe on disk. Flushing the buffer is a valid use case in situations where the automatic flushes ain't good enough for you (e.g. there's too little data written over too long periods, the data is written constantly but needs to be accessible constantly too, you need to be sure the data gets logged in case of crash or power down etc.); yet, on some OS/filesystem combinations (see Why is the file size reported incorrectly for files that are still being written to?), that still won't update the file size accordingly. On Win32, you usually won't see size updates before actually closing/reopening the handle; sometimes re-reading the dir etc. will help, and sometimes it simply won't.
As such, you can use e.g. ReOpenFile to force that update, or simply use close/open instead of flushing. The exact solution depends whether you need the updated filesize so direly and the reduced output rate is not a real problem (in which case reopening is the best option), or if you can live with a wrong size reported (in which case flushes are your best option IMO).
Alright, so, I'm working on a script to execute some commands in an MMC Snapin, and I'm not very experienced with doing this kind of scripting, but i've made a lot of progress...the problem I am having, is if I create a new object every time the script runs, it will massively delay my overall script while the snapin and everything in it loads(which can take as long as five minutes). If it could load the snapin content once and then just take control of it as needed, and only create a new object IF there's not one open already, I'll save a massive amount of time when I run the script sometimes 100 times in a day.
The problem is, I'm not entirely certain how to achieve this. I thought, after some research, that it would be GetObject, but when I do
Dim objMMC
Set objMMC = GetObject("", "MMC20.Application")
It seems to create a new mmc window with no snapins loaded, rather than get the existing one with snapins loaded that I want.
Any advice? Am I just totally off base here, using completely the wrong command, or is there some simple change that I can make to fix this?
Edit:
Is there some weird workaround way I could achieve this, like storing an object to a temporary file so i can at least reuse it through a single session.
I'm in a weird situation where I am trying to add functionality to a powershell script and couldn't find a way to do it directly in powershell, so i'm setting up a vbscript to do one piece of it and calling the vbscript from powershell. I already had to do a lot of research to figure out how to do it in vbscript(and i'm still not sure about all of it) so i guess before i go any further, I'll try to figure out if this is even viable(in vbscript or c# or c++ or any other language someone could suggest)...
What i want to do, overall, is check if an MMC window is open that contains a DHCP snapin. If so, assign it to a variable. If not, create one.
Then it will read from a csv or txt file, and use the values to determine what node to navigate to within the snapin(DHCP>ServerName>IPv4>ScopeName>Scope Options).(I've mostly solved this part in vbscript, but don't know how to do it in C++ or C#)
Finally, I need to be able to execute a right-click menu item to "configure options", navigate the tabs of the popup that comes up, enter a value, and apply the changes/hit ok to close the popup. Worst case, If I can't do it "normally" by actually sending commands to the objects themselves, this part I can do with imitating keystrokes, but i don't want to do that if it's avoidable because it's sloppy.
Then, I basically will just need to somehow alert the powershell script that i'm "finished" so it can continue, or give an alert if there's an error.
I'm not asking anyone to walk me through all this, I just want to know if any of those steps aren't viable as i've described them, especially if I'm going to have to switch to c++ or c# to achieve the first part and therefore relearn the commands needed.
... and only create a new object IF there's not one open already ...
No, this is not possible in VBS, you need to do
Dim objMMC
Set objMMC = WScript.CreateObject("MMC20.Application")
if I create a new object every time the script runs, it will massively delay my overall script
In this case is the VBS the wrong language, you need to use C# or C++ executable.
I got a partial answer to my problem before, and want to solve this problem fully now. The final line of my /Program Files/GNU/vim/_vimrc is
source /homedir/vimsession_file
The filenames that i edit do not change, only their content changes. But, once in a while, i would create a new session file before i exit vim, using
:mks! /homedir/vimsession_file
Everytime i start gVim, i get a message box listing all the files (which I load into the multiple tabs that i have) with a Line number and Character count listed. More detail of this can be found in my orignal post here.
Currently, i am not using the solution proposed in the link given above. The solution i got there was to replace the final line of /Program Files/GNU/vim/_vimrc with the following line:
autocmd VimEnter * source /homedir/vimsession_file
The reason I stopped using the above solution is because my buffers were all getting wiped out (as described in the original post link). So, i was forced to rebuild my buffers every once in a while, when i would restart gVim.
I did search and read in order to solve this on my own. But the closest solution that i saw was here in stackoverflow. But that solution did not work for me either, despite playing with the shortmess variable as suggested there. How can i stop this annoying message box that pops up with OK button, before the start of gVim ? I want to suppress the message box, because the only info i get from it are the line and character count for each file. (NOTE: I looked into the /homedir/vimsession_file and it is about 3500 lines long. I noticed that the file names occur with badd followed by the edit command. For example, i have line 96 and line 164 as below:
Line 96 : badd +16 \Program\ Files\GNU\vim\_vimrc
........
Line 164: edit \Program\ Files\GNU\vim\_vimrc
This pattern repeats for all the other files that get loaded into multiple windows/tabs.
Wanted to post the answer here because there seem to be very few VIM experts who regularly look at stackoverflow. I didn't have the patience to wait many days expecting an answer. I found the answer to my own question, after reading the help file in vim called "starting.txt" which explains the startup/init process of vim and the different initialization files used. The following steps removed the annoying pop-up message box for me, and also made my VIM process start much faster than before due to simplification.
According to what is suggested in starting.txt help file, I separated my numerous tabs/windows/files into different sessions. I recommend reading through this help file (atleast browsing it), if you are a regular user of VIM.
Previously i was lumping numerous files (from different projects) into one single vim session. This is messy and is not the recommended way to use a VIM session file. Before the creation of different session files (for different projects), i first saved my old vim session file so that i can reuse it, during the creation of different session files. You will understand the process clearly if you look at the help file.
I cleaned up my startup procedure further by setting up a new viminfo file, by adding the "-i" parameter to vim.exe (icon) for starting. This was pointed to a new directory and hence gave a fresh start.
The main init files used by vim are viminfo, vimrc and session file. Each is meant for a different purpose. My problem was caused by source /homedir/vimsession_file as the final line of in my vimrc. So, I removed that line, and instead issue that command manually now, after vim starts up (with an empty window). I can source different vimsession_files, in order to load different files (which belong together). On my machine this command takes about 1 second, to load many tabs/windows/files, which belong to a single project/sub-project.
As pointed in the original post URL given in my question, there maybe another way to resolve this by creating and looking at the vimlog file. But i didn't want to bother with that tedious process. The way i am setup now makes more sense to me, because I have various subprojects which properly belong in different sessions of VIM.
I have been facing this problem for sometimes now, a laziness caused in part by the fact that Microsoft Office automatically save files you are working on with versions and automatic recovery.
Many times when I am starting a new notebook in mathematica to do some tests or whatever, I often forget to save what I am doing.
Every now and then, depending on the computer I am using, the computer crashes and all the beautiful work I was doing is lost forever...
Is there a way to get around this other that manically saving my files every five minutes? How about file versioning?
BTW: Using MMA V8
Regarding autosaving, you may want to check out the NotebookAutoSave option, which can be set to True through Fromat->Option Inspector. You have to choose "Selected notebook", then go to Notebook Options -> File Options, and set NotebookAutoSave to True. Then, your notebook will be saved after every evaluation. Whether or not this is a satisfactory solution, of course depends on the situation.
But my experience is that the most reliable way is to develop a CTRL+S reflex - this one never lets me down and is working quite well.
As for the versioning, it is much easier with packages, for which you can use WorkBench which has integrated support for CVS and support for SVN via Eclipse plugin. For notebooks, I refer you to this SO thread. You may also find this Mathgroup discussion of some interest.
EDIT
For M8, for auto-saving purposes you can probably also run
RunScheduledTask[NotebookSave[EvaluationNotebook[]],{300}]
But I can not test this code at the moment
EDIT2
I just came across this post in the Toolbag repository - which may also be an alternative for the autosave part of the question (but please see also the discussion in comments on the relative advantages of scheduled tasks vs. Dynamic)
Since you have MMA version 8 you could use:
saveTask = CreateScheduledTask[FrontEndExecute[FrontEndToken["Save"]], 5*60];
StartScheduledTask[saveTask];
to save every 5 minutes (change the term 5*60 for other timings).
To remove the auto-save task use:
RemoveScheduledTask[saveTask];
To save only a fixed, specific notebook, store its handle in nb (finding it using Notebooks, SelectedNotebook, InputNotebook or EvaluationNotebook) and use FrontEndToken[nb,"Save"] instead of just FrontEndToken["Save"]
I have a Mathematica package that provides auto-backup functionality. When enabled, the current notebook--call it "blah.nb"--will be backed up to "blah.nb~" after a configurable amount of time has elapsed. I use it constantly and it has saved me from losing work many, many times. It's better than autosaving since it doesn't touch the actual notebook file: if you screw something up or something gets corrupted you don't want to overwrite your main file. :)
It's on GitHub here.
I've got an autosave routine that saves a copy of every open, modified notebook every 5 minutes (or whatever interval you prefer. It leaves your manually-saved copy alone, and saves a "swap file" in a separate directory that can be easily recovered if need be. The code (to be copied to init.m) is given in this answer: https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/18380/automatic-recovery-after-crash/65852#65852, and copied below:
Motivated by the same concerns, I wrote the following code and added it to my init.m file. There are two main entries you'll want to change to use this. The global variable $SwapDirectory is where the swap files are saved (by swap file, I mean it in the VIm sense; an "extra" copy of your notebook, separate from your manually saved copy that periodically saves any new work). The swap files are organized within the swap directory in a directory structure which "mirrors" their original file locations, and have ".swp" appended to their file names. The other variable you might want to change is the number of seconds between autosaves, indicated by the "300" (corresponding to 5 minutes) near the bottom of the code below. At the appropriate times, this code will (automatically in the background) save swap files for ALL open notebooks, unless they are unmodified from their manually-saved versions (this exception makes the code more efficient, and more importantly, prevents the storage of swap files for documentation notebooks, for example).
In its current form, the code does not filter for only the input cells, but hopefully you can use the other answers to make that modification yourself.
Some things to note:
1) the Mathematica Put command seems to have trouble writing to network drives, even when offline access is enabled. Therefore, it is probably best to choose a SwapDirectory that is on your local machine.
2) Within SwapDirectory, you should create a sub-directory called "Recovery". This is where the AutoSaveSwap routine will make an initial save of any notebooks for which there is NO existing manual save location.
3) Simply evaluate
RecoverSwap["filePath"]
where "filePath" is a string representing the filePath of the MANUALLY-SAVED copy of the file (i.e., not the file that was created by AutoSave). This will then pop up a window containing the most recent auto-saved version of the file. The manually saved version is NEVER overwritten, unless you explicitly choose to do so. Once the recovered version pops up, you can save it whereever you like, or discard it at your discretion.
4) You should probably add this code to the KERNEL version of init.m ($UserBaseDirectory/Kernel/init.m) rather than the frontend version... this way, if you quit and restart the kernel, the autosave feature will also restart. On the other hand, this means that you must evaluate at least one expression after each start or restart to begin auto-saving. Once this initial evaluation is done, you do NOT need to have evaluated a cell for it to be backed up (unlike the built-in autosave utility).
Hope this helps someone! Feel free to respond with any questions, suggestions, or requests for improvement you may have. And, if you find this post useful, upvotes would be most appeciated! Take care.
$SwapDirectory= "C:\\Users\\pacoj\\Swap Files\\";
SaveSwap[nb_NotebookObject]:=Module[
{fileName, swapFileName, nbout, nbdir, nbdirout, recoveryDir},
If[ ! SameQ[Quiet[NotebookFileName[nb]], $Failed],
(* if the notebook is already saved to the file system *)
fileName = Last[ FileNameSplit[ NotebookFileName[nb]] ];
swapFileName = fileName <> ".swp";
nbdir = Rest[FileNameSplit # NotebookDirectory[nb]];
nbdirout= FileNameJoin[ FileNameSplit[$SwapDirectory]~Join~nbdir]<>"\\";
If[!DirectoryQ[nbdirout], CreateDirectory[nbdirout]];
nbout = NotebookGet[nb];
Put[nbout, nbdirout <> swapFileName],
(* else, if the file has never been saved, save as untitled *)
recoveryDir= $SwapDirectory <> "Recovery\\\";
fileName= ("WindowTitle" /. NotebookInformation[nb])<>".nb";
NotebookSave[nb, recoveryDir <> fileName]
]
];
RecoverSwap::noswp= "swap file `1` not found in expected location";
RecoverSwap[nbfilename_String]:=Module[
{fileName, swapFileName, nbin, nbdir, nbdirout},
fileName= Last[ FileNameSplit[ nbfilename] ];
swapFileName= fileName <> ".swp";
nbdir= Most[ Rest[FileNameSplit # nbfilename] ];
nbdirout= FileNameJoin[ FileNameSplit[$SwapDirectory]~Join~nbdir]<>"\\\";
If[ FileNames[swapFileName, {nbdirout}] == {},
Message[RecoverSwap::noswp,nbdirout <> swapFileName]; Return[],
nbin= Get[nbdirout <> swapFileName]; NotebookPut[nbin]
]
];
AutoSaveSwaps= CreateScheduledTask[
SaveSwap /# Select[Notebooks[], "ModifiedInMemory" /. NotebookInformation[#]&],
300
]
StartScheduledTask[AutoSaveSwaps]