I think about a solution (I guess, server based solution), which inserts affiliate ids/logos into an windows installer (setup.exe, set's up a video converter program, nothing fancy) on the fly.
I see the process like this:
1) User clicks on the link with affiliate ID, link requests server for a download file, system on the fly inserts affiliate's logo and id in to this installer... but I guess this solution is rather a science fiction, cause I can't imagine that this can be done on the fly in seconds.
2) So as the second way of doing this, I see a script/program which automatically creates setup files with affiliate's logos and ID's and stores it on the server, for example, once a day.
Any solutions available on the market of doing this? Or, maybe, this can be achieved with simple HEX editing?
Related
INTRODUCTION
I am part of a project team which uses an old GForge system (community edition v5.6.1) to host our source code and provide some further services. One builtin service is the upload and download feature. Thus users can easily get the generated application version. In order to provide this downloadable version, we as developers have to use a browser (e.g. IE or FF) to navigate into the appropriate GForge page, then tick some buttons, fill some text boxes and finally hit an "upload" button which opens a file dialog to specify any file to be uploaded into the GForge download area. For a download, the procedure is similar. Additionally, from time to time there comes a separate WEB page to request a session login.
Now, as we as developers are in a "hot phase" and need to provide downloadable versions with high frequency, the procedure described above is much too error-prone concerning essential parts of the release, and too slow. Besides that, there is always a real person necessary in front of the screen to click around.
QUESTION
How can we manage to programmatically upload and download generated software versions into and out of GForge's download area while overcoming the password page on the first hand (of course using a valid user account)?
WHAT WE'VE TRIED SO FAR
Using a Python script. Python provides very helpful modules like "urllib", "urllib2" and "requests", with which any HTTP access (even the ones with session password protection) should be managable. After many hours of trying, the GForge system only returns the password request page. Not any of the interesting files. Even far away from uploading anything.
Using an AutoIt script. AutoIt can automate mouse movements and keyboard presses as well as direct access of visible elements on the screen. It provides a "Window Info" application to identify any window element. But e.g. buttons and text fields within WEB pages (HTML) are not recognized. So we don't know how to correctly identify GForge's password text field in order to move the mouse there, and type in the necessary text. And from there go on imitating the person sitting in front of the screen.
Does anybody have some experience regarding the solution of our problem?
I'd upgrade your system to v6.4.2 (current GForge version). From there you will have access to the SOAP interface which will make all this possible. When GForgeNEXT is released, https://next.gforge.com, the SOAP interface will be replace by a REST-ful API making this integration even easier.
The upgrade to v6.4.2 from 5.6.x will be a bit painful but our team would be happy to help, just create an account on gforge.com and then open a free support ticket here:
https://gforge.com/gf/project/gforge5/tracker/?action=TrackerItemBrowse&tracker_id=10345
Disclaimer: My company manages GForge so the advice given above I'd give to any paying client. For further clarity, files in GForge are stored in the file system. The SOAP interface allows you to reach into the database for any ticket or document grab the appropriate document and even replace it. Programatically, it is the cleanest answer.
So I know this might sound crazy, as it is technically a security concern which I understand. So I'm just trying to find out if there's any ideas on how to handle something like this.
Anyways, long story short, I was told to look into figuring out a possible way to scrape information from another browser window/tab. I have been asked to do this because, and I know this sounds crazy too, but the users of our website are incompetent enough to not be able to copy/paste and or type correctly something from a different website. I know it's tough for some to have to have several things in their workflow, but this is basically what they do: Go to their first website (after logging in) and bring up a record with information on it...including an identification number. Then, the user should take that number and go to the second website, our website (after logging in), and type it that number in a textbox (and eventually do some other stuff). But we have found that getting that identification number from the first website to ours is difficult for them. Some copy/paste correctly, some copy/paste too much text from the page, some write it down on paper then type it in our website, and some just seem to have trouble visually "copying" the number from site to site.
What I was thinking was that this could happen: the user would have already brought up the record on the first site, then they would come to ours. They could click a button, and that would run whatever I/we here come up with, that goes and finds the other browser window, finds the specific text needed, and puts it in our textbox. Sounds simple, right? HA.
The first website is not owned or managed by us in any way, otherwise this might be a little easier.
A little bit of background information: unfortunately, I'm technically targeting IE >= 10 through 9, so if there's a solution just for this (why I tagged vbscript), then that's great. If there's a broader solution (like with an applet or browser extensions... http://crossrider.com/ ), then that's even better, but not important. If it helps, we already have a hidden applet on the page that accesses the OS (yes, it has the mayscript attribute on the element so it is able to), so I thought that could be something to incorporate with. Also, the way I expect to know which window/tab to access is by URL and/or document title - either will be very specific.
We cannot install stuff on the users' computers, at least something outside of the browser (like extensions). I'm not sure how browser extensions work, so I'm wondering if they'd need to be "installed".
I know of HTML5's postMessage, but it only has partial support in IE (and none in IE <= 7)...and the partial support refers to not including exactly what I might need. It also requires that the other website be listening (which we don't have control over, but technically might be possible to include). So it doesn't count :)
The things I found with Java are to possibly find the list of processes currently running, but I don't know how to access/control one. Especially how to access the browser's Document.
And vbscript...I just don't know. I don't know if it's just me, but I can't seem to find good documentation on it, so I'm not sure what can be done with it.
Even if I could get control of the other browser window, I don't know how I would get information from it (like the DOM).
I'm not looking for code, just ideas...I'll do the research. And although it may sound impossible, don't just brush it off because Javascript can't do it - I haven't.
UPDATE:
I ended up developing a browser extension with http://www.crossrider.com/ which wasn't ideal, but works.
You could use a bookmarklet for this ... the user would have to drag the bookmarklet into their bookmarks bar on their browser, but if doing that wasn't beyond your user's abilities/the technical restrictions you've mentioned, then you'd definitely be able to send the information you need back to your site that way.
You'd just need to give your users instructions to:
i) drag the bookmarklet into their bookmarks bar on their browser
ii) go to the website in question and click the bookmarklet
you could code the bookmarklet so that it would grab the info you need, and redirect the browser to your website. All done in one click.
I think you may be thinking about it in the wrong way when you talk about posting from one 'window' to another. You could write the bookmarklet so that it would do a http post of whatever information you wanted into your site from the other site, and it could also redirect the window that they were looking at when they clicked it (the other site) to your site. Or if, for some reason, you didn't want to redirect the the window that they had the 'other' site in to your site, then you could add a listener to your site so that once the bookmarklet had posted the info you require then the window with your displaying could automatically update. The first option would make more sense and be easier though.
Maybe to open the other site from button/link resided in your site using window.open() method?
I'm looking for some high-level help with determining the best type of Visual Studio 2010 project to use for an Excel custom application.
I will be developing a program that requires the user to enter a dataset in a particular way. Not using a form per se, but rather in columns and the program will need to do some custom validation on the items in order to prep the data. From there, the user will be able to conduct various operations on the data via a custom Ribbon and associated options. The program will also transmit the data via web service.
I've fooled around with the Add-In project and that gives me a lot of what I need but I'm wondering if a Template or Workbook project is better for this in terms of data entry and being able to "guide" the user a little more.
How do you go about choosing between which project type to use? Do all the project types support a custom Ribbon?
Sorry if this is too far off topic. I'm referring to VBA, not Visual Studio, but it might still be relevant.
With an AddIn, compared to a Workbook, you can separate your code from the user's data. So, if the code is complex, and you'll need to update it separately from user's workbooks with data, this is not a bad idea.
With an AddIn, you can add buttons that do things like check to make sure the user data workbook is ok, or process it in someway. However, the AddIn custom buttons will load ever time a user opens any Excel worksheet. This doesn't sound good, but in practice, isn't so bad. You can code your AddIn so it does nothing as long as no one uses a button, so it almost doesn't hurt load times, etc...
A Workbook might be useful if you need to really guide the user - that is, you cannot rely on the user to hit a button to verify something, and instead you need to verify on every change, for example. However, the workbook solution incorporates the user data and your code in the same workbook, so if you need to update the code for existing users' data, that's harder.
I use a combination of AddIn (.xlam) with buttons, and a template (with minimal self-describing data only).
I'm not sure about the template-only option, so won't comment on that.
I have entered some values in BillBoard, BBControl, EventMapping tables through direct editor...
I can see billboard for InstallFiles action, but it is not being displayed for any other action...
I am also confused what value should i give in Feature column of billboard table....
Billboards are associated with a specific action in InstallExecuteSequence, usually InstallFiles.
Windows Installer doesn't support displaying a billboard across multiple actions. So using billboards is a good solution only for very large installers for which InstallFiles action takes a long time.
For smaller installers a better solution is using HTML host controls. This way you can create your own HTML with some slides. HTML host controls are supported only by some commercial setup authoring tools which offer an external UI.
Edit:
The main question is how long is your installation process and which action is the longest. You can determine this by creating an install log. If it's 1-2 minutes, it's not worth the effort. If it's 10-15 minutes, you can try this: http://kb.flexerasoftware.com/doc/Helpnet/InstallShield2011/IHelpEUDialogsBillboard.htm
So, I've been tasked with making a kiosk for the office for showing statistics about our SCRUM progress, build server status, rentability and so forth. It should ideally run a slideshow with bunch of different pages, some of them showing text, some showing graphs and so on.
What is the best approach for this? I first thought of powerpoint, but It should be able to take the images from a webserver so I can automate the graph generation procedure. I would also like to take text from an external source when showing "Who broke the build" or some page like that.
I have no doubt that ready-made systems exist, but I don't really know where to look for them.
Is this easy/hard in powerpoint? Or are there an ubiquous app that everybody but me knows about?
I would recommend creating it as a series of web-pages, which uses Javascript or the meta refresh tag to cycle though the different pages. Simply full-screen the browser on a spare machine, and connect it to a projector/monitor/big TV.
This has lots of benefits:
it's trivial to display images from an external server (an <img> tag)
it will cost nothing to setup (it can run on basically any functioning machine), and runs in a browser
it is quick to do (you do not have to worry about cross-browser compatibility, or different screen resolutions as you know the exact machine you are developing for
it's expandable - while what you describe is probably possible within Powerpoint, but if you do it as a web-page, you can use Javascript (or a JS framework like jQuery), and it's very easy to serve the pages via a web-server, then you can use any server-side scripting language.
Basically, you would have a series of files, say slide001.htm, slide002.htm and slide003.htm. Slide 1 would redirect to slide002 after 30 seconds, slide002 to slide 003, and slide003 would redirect to slide001..
The specific things you mention: graph generation and "Who broke the build" text:
Not sure which CI tool you use, but many of them generate graphs anyway, so that would be required is having one "slide" with something like <img src="http://hudson.abc/job/proj042/buildTimeGraph">
For the who-broke-the-build text, you would be easiest to run the slides as .php files served though a web-server, using XAMMP.
Then you would have a function that scrapes your CI server for whoever broke the last build, and in one of the slides, you would have <?PHP echo(who_broke_build()); ?>
(Obviously if you know some other language/system better, use that!)
The final benefit I can think of is that, if you serve the files through a web-server, you can allow people display it locally, say as their browsers home-page.
Thanks. I found jqS5 which did most of what you mentioned.
It requires 1 document where every h2 becomes a new slide.
I can then use the meta-refresh to reload to next page every 10 seconds. When I reach the end of the slides, I pull data from an aggregated RSS feed from all the different systems in order to pull information.
http://staticfree.info/projects/jqs5/