Given a working section of Windows Workflow within the designer, I'd like to use that section from another place in the process. I want to create a subroutine.
I suspect this is so obvious, that it hurts.
I'd like to stay within the the designer. Going outside and writing vb.net or C# would work, but it involves re-writing existing code.
I'm hoping that a properly selected chunk can be manipulated/edited by some menu selection.
Create a composite activity, a XAML file, and reuse that in multiple places on the worklfow.
Related
I'm trying to develop a small plugin that will do a sort-of auto-completion along with some other advanced features in order to create a primitive IDE to use with a custom scripting language we've developed.
So I want to know, how do the auto-complete plugins usually work? I have a basic plugin template that I'm playing around with (the C# one) and I see how the commands work, from a high level anyway, but I'm trying to figure out how I would create my auto-complete feature.
My first guess would be to make a command that spawned a new thread that retrieved the entire contents of the notepad++ text every 100 mills or so and then popped-up a little selector box or directly wrote the auto-complete possibilities when the correct pattern was matched on the newly typed text.
Any wisdom from those who have gone before me on this?
Thanks alot.
Well I figured it out. Apparently there is a "beNotified" method in my project template that I downloaded and it handles all events/notifications from the Scintilla/Notepad++ environment. I will probably be using the SCN_CHARADDED event to check the current line of text each time a character is added to the GUI.
Recently I've been finding myself doing repetitive tasks. I would click button A, highlight text field A, type in some text, click an APPLY button, click on a drop-down box and select a specific option depending on the item I'm working with, select it and hit APPLY, then repeat this process only a couple hundred to thousand times.
So I thought maybe there's a way I could automate this? Macros then came to mind. However I've never wrote macros before so am not sure of several details such as
-what tools should I even work with?
-how do I determine which button to click?
-ideally, I would want to be able to read input from a text file to specify what should be typed in and which option should be selected from the dropdown list. Is this even possible? It seems like an operation that require some intelligence.
I am not picky on tools nor about cleanliness. I just want to be able to automate the process. It will be for personal use unless I find a convenient way such that others can use it as well.
Some details about the dropdown box: when the box is focused, I can hit the DOWN key to scroll from option to option. The items that I have to associate with these options are named exactly the same, so they appear in the same "index" order (meaning, the first item and first option appear at the top of the list, second item and second option appear after, thid item and third option...etc)
The placement of all of these fields can be fixed, so if I have to manually specify where on the screen I should be clicking, that is also a possibility.
Any idea where I should look?
If you're using Windows, AutoIt is a really nice tool.
It records actions (like a word/excel macro)
It offers a BASIC like language + API which is really easy to program (if you need to)
The API is pretty powerful
Check for Windows with a certain title
Automate klicks
...
You can "compile" your scripts into exe files so you can share your tools
It comes bundled with Scite (a nice text editor) + AutoIt syntax higlighting
But you can use any editor you want
It's well documented
It's Freeware
http://www.autoitscript.com/site/
On the Mac, there is Automator. Java has the Robot class in the basic library, to help with such automation. No doubt there are other similar tools.
Our PowerBuilder application is fairly large and has many objects in several PBLs for organizing our code. We often have 10 or more datawindows on one window, and these datawindows may be spread across two or three PBLs. For version control, we use exclusive check-out to avoid merge conflicts.
The situation is that when you right-click on a datawindow object from the Window painter you get a context-menu with options like "Script" and "Properties" and "Modify Datawindow...". We'd like to add one for "Check-out..." to avoid having to hunt for the datawindow in several PBLs.
Any ideas on how to do this, or something similar, would be greatly appreciated.
I think the best you can do is to create a temporary library at the top of your library list, locate your datawindows by jumping to them via "Modify Datawindow...", then saving them into your temporary library, and finally using the tools in your source control system to locate them by name and lock them.
One other trick that I use is to uncheck the tick box in the source control options that clears down the .srd etc files, then using your operating system's find tools to search on file name for these (since Powerbuilder still doesn't support searching for objects by name...). Of course if you don't have many objects, and if your objects don't have many references, you could always use Powerbuilder's search... but who do you know in the that fortunate position?!!
I think you've hit on a problem that a lot of people run into, which runs right through a loophole in PB that lets you start editing a DataWindow without warning you to check it out. Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge there is no way to hook into the context menu.
However, you can hook into toolbar items. If that was the way I wanted to go, and I had plenty of time to spare, I'd write an app that I would launch from the toolbar, and here's what it would do:
Find the PowerBuilder window with APIs
Find the current sheet in PB
Get the object name out of the title
Get the current application (registry or PB.INI, depending on the version of PB, and may involve getting the workspace first, then the current target)
Get the library list (PB.INI or target file)
Do a LibraryExport() on the object that's open
Find all DataWindow controls (this may involve looking at ancestors to determine control types)
Identify dataobjects for these controls (again, you may need to look at ancestors)
Use LibraryDirectory() to get a list of all objects in all PBLs
Find the dataobjects' PBLs
Throw up a window listing the dataobjects and their PBLs
OTOH, if I had PBL Peeper (and, yes, this is biased advice), I'd
Launch the "PBL Peeper (Browse current application)" icon on my desktop (OK, that's a lie; I'd already have PBL Peeper open and would just switch to the Browse page)
Ctrl-Q (for QuickFind) and start typing the name of the object (if you pause, it will find a partial match on what you've typed)
Hit [Enter] once to accept QuickFind's selection
Hit [Enter] again to expand the object
Find the DataWindow control in question and RMB on it
Select "Go to Default DataWindow"
If it doesn't show the library and name in the microhelp (it's been a long time since I've released a version, and I can't keep track of what's in the released version), find the Up toolbar item to go up to the PBL
I know this doesn't achieve a checkout, but it does "avoid having to hunt for the datawindow in several PBLs". And, you can probably achieve this faster than my first suggestion.
Good luck,
Terry
The way I do it is to right-click and choose Modify DataWindow. When the painter opens you can just read the PBL from the title of the painter. Then close the DataWindow painter so PB will let you check out the DataWindow. For the more general case of locating an arbitrary user object, use Terry's PBL Peeper method.
You could separate the organization of PBLs used for development from those used for deployment.
As long as the PBL names don't conflict between the two views into the source code. The PBG files registered in source control won't clobber each other.
The downside is that when new objects are added or deleted, you will need to update both locations.
I would create a datawindow only PBL with all the related objects and put them in the same target. When I worked with that sub-system or report i could then check out all the objects in the same library.
I'm trying to integrate our Source Control(SourceAnywhere) with VS and are getting a lot of push back because of this one issue.
Almost every time we open some of our Windows forms using 'View Designer' it edits the file (* appears beside file name). Nothing has yet been changed, I've tried comparing the before and after files and they are exactly the same. If we have the solution bound it will check the file out, but even if its not bound it still 'edits' the file. When you try to check the file back in, it doesn't get a new version or anything.
I've done some searching and haven't been able to find any way to change this behavior.
This is a huge pain point for me as if someone already has the form checked out and someone else tries to open it, they just get told that it can't be checked out, and the form won't open. Or, someone who has no intention to edit the form, will now have the form checked out but hasn't made any changes.
Thoughts?
This usually happens when there are controls within the form that have "Dock" set. If the IDE feels it needs to resize the form, then those controls will also be resized, and all of that information needs to get re-written to the source file. In the case where you're editing a form named "Form1" this source file is not Form1.cs, but rather Form1.Designer.cs - try comparing that file with the version from source control.
Alternatively, move to a source control system that doesn't use locking by default (for example, Subversion) or disable that feature in SourceAnywhere. This will require users to manage merge conflicts, but allows multiple users to work on a single file at the same time.
I'm thinking of trying to create a "drop box" application that can automatically organize files as you drop them into a folder. I always end up with a bunch of random files on my desktop, and I think it would be useful to be able to drag them onto an icon/folder on the desktop and have them automatically sorted into other locations based on some rules (file extensions, naming conventions, etc.)
I'm not sure how to implement this. Can anyone point me to any resources/tips on how to accomplish something like this? Maybe some sort of drag and drop folder extension?
One idea would be to have a background process that periodically checks a folder and just moves files around, but it would be cool to have this happen automagically w/out a background process.
Thanks
In C# FileSystemWatcher is your friend, check a little tutorial. It's just a wrapper over ReadDirectoryChangesW on Win32 so you could use if you use another language. Linux provide the same via dnotify.