So, I'm building a windows forms application that uses a StreamReader/StreamWriter to read each line of the .aspx, .ascx and .master pages on our asp.net website. It then removes certain properties and such from the controls through string manipulation, and writes the result back (overriding the page's markup with the edited markup). The problem is some of these pages are being written as one continuous line.
I've been unable to find anyway to call the visual studios 'Format Document' function. I found this question that would likely accomplish my goal if I weren't trying to do this from my Windows Form Application (as it's an automated process).
Any tips or points in the right direction would be appreciated.
A quick-and-dirty-solution would be (and I don't recommend it):
content = content.Replace("></", ">></").Replace("><", ">\n\t<").Replace(">></", "></");
content is the string that holds the web content.
First and last replacements are to avoid the second replacement to add newlines between something like this <tag></tag>. The above code of course has some flaws. Something like <tag1><tag2 /></tag1> will not be formatted correctly. You could avoid this by pre-replacing /></ with something you can safely re-replace at the end.
You may also want to replace \n with \r\n perhaps.
Related
I am building an Angular test preparation app (with Laravel 5.1 API). One of the requirements is to allow the user to print a certificate of achievement.
The client wants the person's name and credentials interpolated into the document (e.g., highlighted below). Here is a snapshot of the PDF template they sent:
The way I'm handling PDF viewing is simply by storing the file on S3 and giving them a link to that file.
Interpolating information into a PDF doc doesn't seem trivial and I haven't found much information on programmatically allowing this, but there are tools like DocHub, that allow you do edit while viewing the PDF.
I'm interested in learning:
is doing this programmatically trivial?
are there 3rd party tools I'm unaware of?
would I even be able to send this information along to the S3 link to interpolate in the first place?
Using PDF as a format for editing is usually a bad choice. If you have a form with fixed fields, then it's easy. Create a PDF template with an interactive form. In this form, based on AcroForm technology, you'll define fields with fixed coordinates, and a fixed size. You can then add content to these fields.
One major disadvantage with this approach is the lack of flexibility. Did you notice that I used the word "fixed" three times in the previous paragraph? If text doesn't fit the predefined field, you're out of luck. If the field is overdimensioned, you'll end up with plenty of white space. This approach is great if you can predict what the data will be like. A typical use case is a ticket or a voucher. For instance: the empty form is a really nice page, with only a couple of fields where an automated system can put a name, a date, a time, and a seat number.
This isn't the best approach for the example you show in your screen shot. The position of every line of text, every word, every character is known in advance. If you want to replace a short word with a long word (or vice-versa), then all those positions (of each line, of the complete page, possibly of the complete document) need to be recalculated. That's madness. Only people with very poor design skills come up with such an idea.
A better idea, is to store the template as HTML. See for instance chapter 5 of iText's pdfHTML tutorial, where we have this snippet of HTML:
<html>
<head>
<title>Invitation to SXSW 2018</title>
</head>
<body>
<u><b>Re: Invitation</b></u>
<br>
<p>Dear <name>SXSW visitor</name>,
we hope you had a great SXSW film festival experience last year.
And we would like to invite you to the next edition of SXSW Film
that takes place from March 9 until March 17, 2018.</p>
<p>Sincerely,<br>
The SXSW crew<br>
<date>August 4, 2017</date></p>
</body>
</html>
Actually, it's not really HTML, because the <name> tag and the <date> tag don't exist in HTML. All HTML processors (browsers as well as pdfHTML) ignore those tags and treat their content as if the tag was a <span>:
It doesn't make much sense to have such tags in the context of pure HTML, but it does make a lot of sense in the case of pdfHTML. With pdfHTMLL, you can configure custom tags, and have a result that looks like the PDFs shown below:
Look at the document for "John Doe" and compare it with the document for "Bruno Lowagie". The name "John Doe" is much shorter than my name, hence more words fit on that first line. The text flows nicely (we could also have chosen to justify the text on both sides). This "flow" is impossible to achieve with your approach, because you will never get a PDF template to reflow nicely.
OK, I get it, you probably say, but what about the practical aspects? You talk about a Java / .Net library, but I am working with Laravel and Angular.js. First, let me tell you that I don't think you'll find any good PDF tools for Laravel or Angular.js, because of the nature of PDF and those development environments (in my opinion, those technologies don't play well together). Regardless of my opinion, this shouldn't be much of a problem for you because you work in an Amazon environment. AWS supports Java, and the Java code needed to get pdfHTML working is minimal. Most of the code samples I wrote for the pdfHTML tutorial are shorter than 15 lines. So why not try Java and pdfHTML?
If you're already using Amazon services, why not use an amazon lambda function, in combination with iText7 (java), to generate the pdf on demand?
That way, you are guaranteed that the pdf is correct, and has nice layout every time.
Generating the pdf can either be done by:
converting HTML,
programmatically creating your entire document,
filling and flattening an XFA form.
I think for your use-case, either option 1 or 2 are the most sustainable.
I`m working at a little text editor. My application is a winapi one in C. The idea is to write text in a large textbox(like in notepad) and then when I press a button it will take all text into a buffer, format it after some rules and then put it in a .txt file.
For example, if my input is:
Anne \red(got) \blue(\bold(apples)) and \italic(\bold(snails!))
After I parse it, it`s possible to put it into a .txt file and after I open it to see it like this?
I want to thank everyone for their time. I got exactly what answer I wanted. Everyone here rocks
I think that you are programming for fun, just for the pleasure of it, and with the perspective of learning more. If that is the objective, then it is okay to invent your own formats and essay your own solutions.
The problem presented can be twofold:
does the format results need to be shown in the editor itself?
or do you just need to do something that is going to be rendered in an external program?
If you are after the first possibility, then you need some Win32 (given your environment) component that will show the formatting. That component is RichEdit, and it implements RTF, a codification that can be saved to a text file, and which is more or less standard.
If you have the second possibility in mind, then you can choose from a variety of codifications. You would just be creating a text editor, probably with some helpers that write part of the commands for the user. For example, you could be creating a HTML editor, or a RTF editor.
There is a third possibility, though. You create your own codification, and when saving, you translate that codification to HTML, and then open the document in a web browser.
Say that you have:
\bold(hello), world.
You would translate that to:
<html><body><b>hello</b>, world.</body></html>
The possibilities, as you can see, are inifinite.
Hope this helps.
I am migrating Spreadsheet gear of my application from 6.0.3.190 to
7.4.1.104.I am getting my issues with Color property.Can any one help me in this.Now I am using using Color = System.Drawing.Color; and also ToSGColor().This became very hectic to do in all places where ever we use color.I expect we should have some shortcut to do this.Can any one suggest me How can i get all functionalities with few changes only.I am also getting exceptions to c onvert IColorFormat.LineColor to system.drawing.Color.
Note the "Breaking Changes" page in the SpreadsheetGear 2012 documentation, which lists this particular change:
In order to support WPF and Silverlight, the core API has been
separated from the GDI+ and Windows Forms APIs and therefore uses the
new SpreadsheetGear.Color type rather than
SpreadsheetGear.Drawing.Color. SpreadsheetGear.Drawing.Color has been
moved to SpreadsheetGear2012.Drawing.dll. See
SpreadsheetGear.Drawing.Color for an example which uses the implicit
and static converters to convert between SpreadsheetGear.Color,
SpreadsheetGear.Drawing.Color and System.Drawing.Color.
SpreadsheetGear.Colors and SpreadsheetGear.SystemColors provide
helpful predefined colors to replace the use of predefined colors in
System.Drawing.Color.
So you'll need to ensure than any place where you were previously using System.Drawing colors now use SpreadsheetGear.Drawing colors, including API like IColorFormat.LineColor.
There aren't really any "migration" tools to automatically convert such instances to the new API. So you'll need to resolve these errors for each code file. Doing a Find/Replace keyword search for "System.Drawing" and "SpreadsheetGear.Drawing" could possibly speed up the process, though this would depend on what using statements you have added to each code file.
Could anyone tell me if there's some way of "hooking in" to DotNetNuke so that I can, for example, search and replace text for ALL HTML modules on the site?
e.g. if I use an HTML editor and enter the text {{replace_me}}, then I could have some code that detects "{{replace_me}}" every time a page is rendered and replace it with something else.
Please note that this is a simple example - there may be other ways of "replacing" text - however the actual use case we have is very specific and there will be some significant processing to decide what to replace :) - so whatever solution we implement should basically be:
Get HTML from DB -> Process it however we wish in full C# -> Deliver the modified string.
Thanks!
I believe you can do this with the use of an HTTPModule. Ifinity.com.au used to sell a module that did this, looks like you might be able to download it now for free (maybe?) at http://www.ifinity.com.au/Products/Inline_Link_Master/Product_Details
A friend of mine is now building a web application with J2EE and Struts, and it's going to be prepared to display pages in several languages.
I was told that the best way to support a multi-language site is to use a properties file where you store all the strings of your pages, something like:
welcome.english = "Welcome!"
welcome.spanish = "¡Bienvenido!"
...
This solution is ok, but what happens if your site displays news or something like that (a blog)? I mean, content that is not static, that is updated often... The people that keep the site have to write every new entry in each supported language, and store each version of the entry in the database. The application loads only the entries in the user's chosen language.
How do you design the database to support this kind of implementation?
Thanks.
Warning: I'm not a java hacker, so YMMV but...
The problem with using a list of "properties" is that you need a lot of discipline. Every time you add a string that should be output to the user you will need to open your properties file, look to see if that string (or something roughly equivalent to it) is already in the file, and then go and add the new property if it isn't. On top of this, you'd have to hope the properties file was fairly human readable / editable if you wanted to give it to an external translation team to deal with.
The database based approach is useful for all your database based content. Ideally you want to make it easy to tie pieces of content together with their translations. It only really falls down for all the places you may want to output something that isn't out of a database (error messages etc.).
One fairly old technology which we find still works really well, is to use gettext. Gettext or some variant seems to be available for most languages and platforms. The basic premise is that you wrap your output in a special function call like so:
echo _("Please do not press this button again");
Then running the gettext tools over your source code will extract all the instances wrapped like that into a "po" file. This will contain entries such as:
#: myfolder/my.source:239
msgid "Please do not press this button again"
msgstr ""
And you can add your translation to the appropriate place:
#: myfolder/my.source:239
msgid "Please do not press this button again"
msgstr "s’il vous plaît ne pas appuyer sur le bouton ci-dessous à nouveau"
Subsequent runs of the gettext tools simply update your po files. You don't even need to extract the po file from your source. If you know you may want to translate your site down the line, then you can just use the format shown above (the underscored function) with all your output. If you don't provide a po file it will just return whatever you put in the quotes. gettext is designed to work with locales so the users locale is used to retrieve the appropriate po file. This makes it really easy to add new translations.
Gettext Pros
Doesn't get in your way while coding
Very easy to add translations
PO files can be compiled down for speed
There are libraries available for most languages / platforms
There are good cross platform tools for dealing with translations. It is actually possible to get your translation team set up with a tool such as poEdit to make it very easy for them to manage translation projects
Gettext Cons
Solves your site "furniture" needs, but you would usually still want a database based approach for your database driven content
For more info on gettext see this wikipedia page
They way I have designed the database before is to have an News-table containing basic info like NewsID (int), NewsPubDate (datetime), NewsAuthor (varchar/int) and then have a linked table NewsText that has these columns: NewsID(int), NewsText(text), NewsLanguageID(int). And at last you have a Language-table that has LanguageID(int) and LanguageName(varchar).
Then, when you want to show your users the news-page you do:
SELECT NewsText FROM News INNER JOIN NewsText ON News.NewsID = NewsText.NewsID
WHERE NewsText.NewsLanguageID = <<Session["UserLanguageID"]>>
That Session-bit is a local variable where you store the users language when they log in or enters the site for the first time.
Java web applications support internationalization using the java standard tag library.
You've really got 2 problems. Static content and dynamic content.
for static content you can use jstl. It uses java ResourceBundles to accomplish this. I managed to get a Databased backed bundle working with the help of this site.
The second problem is dynamic content.
To solve this problem you'll need to store the data so that you can retrieve different translations based on the user's Locale. (Locale includes Country and Language).
It's not trivial, but it is something you can do with a little planning up front.
#Auron
thats what we apply it to. Our apps are all PHP, but gettext has a long heritage.
Looks like there is a good Java implementation
Tag libraries are fine if you're using JSP, but you can also achieve I18N using a template-based technology such as FreeMarker.