How to make Xll stop working (if license is invalid)? - xll

So, if I want to write an Xll and license the code then I need a point at which to check the license file and if license is invalid then I want the Xll to stop working.
I see xlAutoOpen looks like a good place to inspect the license file. I also see that xlAutoOpen must return 1 according to the documentation, what happens if something other than 1 is returned? Can I abort the Xll opening? Can I force an unload?
Are there any better places to check the license and refuse to operate. Surely, I don't have to wait until the first worksheet function invocation.
I am unfamiliar with this framework currently so forgive newbie-ness.
EDIT: I suppose I can refuse to call xlfRegister. That will prevent operation.
EDIT2: From the Excel SDK Help file
xlAutoAdd ... can be used to ... check licensing information, for example.
Also, found that on MSDN xlAutoAdd

You should check licensing information in xlAutoOpen since this function is the first entry point to activate the XLL and is always called by Excel. If password is invalid just returns 0 to indicates failure to excel and do not register your UDFs (quit before to call xlfRegister).
I have noticed that if you register your UDFs and that you returns 0 ,
the xll is still loaded and UDFs are available, so the return
variable from xlAutoOpen does not seem to be taken into account by
Excel but by convention I believe it is better to keep returning zero
to indicate failure.
I believe MSDN doc is misleading.
xlAutoAdd is not suitable to check license since it is an optional function that is called only when the XLL is added by the Add-In Manager or when it is opened as a document (using File/Open). I assume that you may have trial licence and so that you should check it at every load time if the user's licence is still valid.
Example
Usually, you call xlAutoOpen from xlAutoAdd so your check will still be done :
pseudo code :
int __stdcall xlAutoAdd(void)
{
if(!Isinitialised)
if( xlAutoOpen() == 0) // licence check is still performed
returns 0 ;
...
MessageBoxA(GetActiveWindow(), "Thank you to install ...", "AutoOpen", MB_OK);
Isinitialised = true;
}
since xlAutoOpen is always called by Excel you should perform a similar check inside it :
bool Isinitialised = false;
int __stdcall xlAutoOpen(void) // Register the functions
{
if(Isinitialised)
return 1;
if(!ValidLicense()) // check licence in xlAutoOpen
return 0;
// continue initialization , registration ..
.....
Isinitialised = true;
}
Finally note that you can omit xlAutoAdd because it has no adverse consequences and is not required by Excel. Personally I do not use this function.

Related

How to store keywords in firebase firestore

My application use keywords extensively, everything is tagged with keywords, so whenever use wants to search data or add data I have to show keywords in auto complete box.
As of now I am storing keywords in another collection as below
export interface IKeyword {
Id:string;
Name:string;
CreatedBy:IUserMin;
CreatedOn:firestore.Timestamp;
}
export interface IUserMin {
UserId:string;
DisplayName:string;
}
export interface IKeywordMin {
Id:string;
Name:string;
}
My main document holds array of Keywords
export interface MainDocument{
Field1:string;
Field2:string;
........
other fields
........
Keywords:IKeywordMin[];
}
But problem is auto complete reads data frequently and my document reads quota increases very fast.
Is there a way to implement this without increasing reads for keyword ? Because keyword is not the real data we need to get.
Below is my query to get main documents
query = query.where("Keywords", "array-contains-any", keywords)
I use below query to get keywords in auto complete text box
query = query.orderBy("Name").startAt(searchTerm).endAt(searchTerm+ '\uf8ff').limit(20)
this query run many times when user types auto complete search which is causing more document reads
Does this answer your question
https://fireship.io/lessons/typeahead-autocomplete-with-firestore/
Though the receommended solution is to use 3rd party tool
https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/solutions/search
To reduce documents read:
A solution that come to my mind however I'm not sure if it's suitable for your use case is using Firestore caching feature. By default, firestore client will always try to reach the server to get the new changes on your documents and if it cannot reach the server, it will reach to the cached data on the client device. you can take advantage of this feature by using the cache first and reach the server only when you want. For web application, this feature is disabled by default and you can enable it like in
https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/manage-data/enable-offline
to help you understand this feature more check this article:
https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/manage-data/enable-offline
I found a solution, thought I would share here
Create a new collection named typeaheads in below format
export interface ITypeAHead {
Prefix:string;
CollectionName:string;
FieldName:string;
MatchingValues:ILookupItem[]
}
export interface ILookupItem {
Key:string;
Value:string;
}
depending on the minimum letters add either 2 or 3 letters to Prefix, and search based on the prefix, collection and field. so most probably you will end up with 2 or 3 document reads for on search.
Hope this helps someone else.

Evernote IOS SDK fetchResourceByHashWith throws exception

Working with Evernote IOS SDK 3.0
I would like to retrieve a specific resource from note using
fetchResourceByHashWith
This is how I am using it. Just for this example, to be 100% sure about the hash being correct I first download the note with a single resource using fetchNote and then request this resource using its unique hash using fetchResourceByHashWith (hash looks correct when I print it)
ENSession.shared.primaryNoteStore()?.fetchNote(withGuid: guid, includingContent: true, resourceOptions: ENResourceFetchOption.includeData, completion: { note, error in
if error != nil {
print(error)
seal.reject(error!)
} else {
let hash = note?.resources[0].data.bodyHash
ENSession.shared.primaryNoteStore()?.fetchResourceByHashWith(guid: guid, contentHash: hash, options: ENResourceFetchOption.includeData, completion: { res, error in
if error != nil {
print(error)
seal.reject(error!)
} else {
print("works")
seal.fulfill(res!)
}})
}
})
Call to fetchResourceByHashWith fails with
Optional(Error Domain=ENErrorDomain Code=0 "Unknown error" UserInfo={EDAMErrorCode=0, NSLocalizedDescription=Unknown error})
The equivalent setup works on Android SDK.
Everything else works so far in IOS SDK (chunkSync, auth, getting notebooks etc.. so this is not an issue with auth tokens)
would be great to know if this is an sdk bug or I am still doing something wrong.
Thanks
This is a bug in the SDK's "EDAM" Thrift client stub code. First the analysis and then your workarounds.
Evernote's underlying API transport uses a Thrift protocol with a documented schema. The SDK framework includes a layer of autogenerated stub code that is supposed to marshal input and output params correctly for each request and response. You are invoking the underlying getResourceByHash API method on the note store, which is defined per the docs to accept a string type for the contentHash argument. But it turns out the client is sending the hash value as a purely binary field. The service is failing to parse the request, so you're seeing a generic error on the client. This could reflect evolution in the API definition, but more likely this has always been broken in the iOS SDK (getResourceByHash probably doesn't see a lot of usage). If you dig into the more recent Python version of the SDK, or indeed also the Java/Android version, you can see a different pattern for this method: it says it's going to write a string-type field, and then actually emits a binary one. Weirdly, this works. And if you hack up the iOS SDK to do the same thing, it will work, too.
Workarounds:
Best advice is to report the bug and just avoid this method on the note store. You can get resource data in different ways: First of all, you actually got all the data you needed in the response to your fetchNote call, i.e. let resourceData = note?.resources[0].data.body and you're good! You can also pull individual resources by their own guid (not their hash), using fetchResource (use note?.resources[0].guid as the param). Of course, you may really want to use the access-by-hash pattern. In that case...
You can hack in the correct protocol behavior. In the SDK files, which you'll need to build as part of your project, find the ObjC file called ENTProtocol.m. Find the method +sendMessage:toProtocol:withArguments.
It has one line like this:
[outProtocol writeFieldBeginWithName:field.name type:field.type fieldID:field.index];
Replace that line with:
[outProtocol writeFieldBeginWithName:field.name type:(field.type == TType_BINARY ? TType_STRING : field.type) fieldID:field.index];
Rebuild the project and you should find that your code snippet works as expected. This is a massive hack however and although I don't think any other note store methods will be impacted adversely by it, it's possible that other internal user store or other calls will suddenly start acting funny. Also you'd have to maintain the hack through updates. Probably better to report the bug and don't use the method until Evernote publishes a proper fix.

How do you debug Firestore security rules?

I'm crying myself to sleep on this one.
My getAfter is returning an object that only has 1 field, as every other field type is incorrect. Which I have no idea how to check without any debugging tools (I can't see the data, so its all guess and check).
Here is a watered down version of my rules for users.
match /users/{userId} {
function isValidUser(user) {
return user.id is string &&
(user.address is string || user.address == null) &&
(user.dateOfBirth is number || user.dateOfBirth == null) &&
user.email is string &&
user.name is string &&
(user.phoneNumber is string || user.phoneNumber == null);
}
function isValidWrite(userId, user) {
return signedIn() &&
writeHasMatchingId(userId, user) &&
isValidUser(user);
}
allow read: if signedIn();
allow create: if signedInAndWriteHasMatchingId(userId) &&
userHasId(userId) &&
isValidUser(request.resource.data); // Tested
allow update: if isValidWrite(
userId,
getAfter(/databases/$(database)/documents/users/$(userId))
);
}
and this is the transaction I am trying to run.
const user1Ref = this.userCollection.doc(user1Id);
const user2Ref = this.userCollection.doc(user2Id);
const batchWrite = this.store.batch();
batchWrite.update(user1Ref, {
"details.friend": user2Id,
});
batchWrite.update(user2Ref, {
"details.wishlist": true,
});
batchWrite.commit();
If I comment out the isValidUser(user) line, the operation succeeds. If I leave any line uncommented out inside the function isValidUser(user) except user.id is string, it fails.
Why would the getAfter document only have the id field and no others when they are listed in the Firebase console? Is there a way to output or debug the value of getAfter so I can see what it even is?
I'm answering based on just one line of your question:
Is there a way to output or debug the value of getAfter so I can see what it even is?
There kind of is - at least in 2020.
When one runs something in the Rules Playground (Rules Simulator, see bottom left), the steps taken in the rule evaluation are shown like this:
This list sometimes gives indications that help figure out what the rules evaluator is doing. It's a bit tedious that one needs to 'click' the steps open, individually, instead of seeing true/false just by glancing. But it's better than nothing.
Note: I presume this feature is under development by Firebase. It sometimes seems to give wrong information - or I have failed to read it correctly. But it may help, and looks like a good place for providing such information to the developers. We really would like to see: with the current data, the built query document, and the rules, how does Firebase see it and why does the rule evaluate to true or false?
Another approach, not mentioned here yet and likely not available at the time the question was raised, is wrapping your rules with debug().
Why this is cool?
Allows to see the values suspected of not being right; I still use the same comment-out-narrow-down method that #ColdLogic nicely described in one of their comments
Why this is not enough?
There is no tagging about which value was output; just eg. int_value: 0. Debug would benefit from eg. printing the first 10 letters of the equation it's evaluating, in the output.
Security Rules rejection reasons are still awfully short, as false for 'update' # L44.
the line number always points to the main expression being evaluated. Never to a function called, or a subexpression with && that really causes the fail.
Firebase could fix this (not change the output syntax; just give a more detailed line number). That would eliminate the need to comment-out-and-narrow-down.
The output goes to firestore-debug.log (fairly hidden), so one needs to open yet another terminal and keep an eye on it.
Debugging Security Rules is unnecessarily difficult - and I'm afraid it means people don't use their full potential. We should change this.

How do I have my Bot respond with arguments?

So I've built a Telegram bot, which can receive the following commands:
/list
/info 123
This works great, as I can catch /info and pass the additional arguments as ints. But, sadly, the Telegram clients don't see /info 123 as a complete command, but just the /info part. Is there a way to make it recognize the entirety of the command as the command?
I've tried Markdown-ing it: [/info 123](/info 123), but no joy. Is this possible?
I've reached out to #BotSupport with the same question, and he/they/it responded swiftly with the following answer:
Hi, at the moment it is not possible to highlight parameters of a command. I any case, you may can find a workaround if you use correct custom keyboards ;)
— #BotSupport
Custom keyboards may be an option for someone, but not for me. The solution I've gone for is to give the command as /info123. As the bot receives all / commands, I check if the received command starts with info, and if so, I remove the info part. I convert the remaining string/int to arguments, and pass that along to the relevant command.
If you mean to pass the 123 as an argument for your command info and if you happen to use the python-telegram-bot, then here's how you do it:
dispatcher.add_handler(CommandHandler('hello', SayHello, pass_args=True))
According to the documentation: pass_args Determines whether the handler should be passed the arguments passed to the command as a keyword argument called args. It will contain a list of strings, which is the text following the command split on single or consecutive whitespace characters. Default is False.
you can use RegexHandler() to do this.
Here is an example
def info(bot, update):
id = update.message.text.replace('/info_', '')
update.message.reply_text(id, parse_mode='Markdown')
def main():
updater = Updater(TOKEN)
updater.dispatcher.add_handler(RegexHandler('^(/info_[\d]+)$', info))
updater.start_polling()
Usage
The command /info_120 will return 120
and /info_007 will return 007
UPDATE
for newer versions, you may use this method instead!
MessageHandler(filters.Regex(r'^(/info_[\d]+)$'), info)
To get the argument of command you don't even need to use pass_args as said Moein you can simply get it from context.args look at Github page. So you can pass as many arguments as you want and you will get a list of arguments! Here is an example from Github.
def start_callback(update, context):
user_says = " ".join(context.args)
update.message.reply_text("You said: " + user_says)
...
dispatcher.add_handler(CommandHandler("start", start_callback))
ForceReply
Upon receiving a message with this object, Telegram clients will display a reply interface to the user (act as if the user has selected the bot's message and tapped 'Reply'). This can be extremely useful if you want to create user-friendly step-by-step interfaces without having to sacrifice privacy mode.
a simple shot
In this case, a user should send a valid number with /audio command (e.g. /audio 3, if they forgot it, we can inform and force them to do so.
source:
https://core.telegram.org/bots/api#forcereply
This is a fairly rudimentary way of creating kwargs from user input.
Unfortunately, it does require the user to be aware of the fields that can be used as parameters, but if you can provide informative response when the user doesnt provide any detectable kwarg style messages then you could probably make a better experience.
As I say, extremely rudimentary idea, and would probably be achieved faster with the regex filters available. And this would be much more reliable when checking input from the user of the "pesky" variety.
The script relies on || delimiter preceeding the command and as is shown will trim any extra characters like new lines and spaces
You can remove the extra check for commit as this is provided in order to tell the bot that you want to save your input to the database explicitly.
def parse_kwargs(update):
commit = False
kwargs = {}
if update.message:
for args in update.message.text.split('||')[1:]:
for kw_pair in args.split(','):
key, value = kw_pair.split('=')
if key.strip() != 'commit':
kwargs[key.strip()] = value.strip()
elif key.strip() == 'commit' and value.strip().lower() == 'true':
commit = True
return kwargs, commit

Warning: XXX may not respond to YYY

Hey, I am making some stuff in Objective-C++... And I must say that I am a total newbie when it comes to the Objective-C part... I don't really want to learn it, I kinda just need it for accessing a few Mac APIs (ObjC is such a dumb language).
So - compiling with g++ -x objective-c++ - and I somehow keep getting this warning:
XXX may not respond to YYY
First it was with a NSScreen, now it is with a NSWindow:
NSWindow may not respond to +initWithContentRect:styleMask:backing:defer:
I saw somewhere that I should cast it to id, but didn't work, throwing absolutely cryptic errors...
So - WHAT does this warning actually mean and HOW am I supposed to make it stop?
EDIT: Okay, apparently I need to ALLOCATE an instance first, then I can call its init function... Anyways, now the GCC is reporting:
confused by earlier errors, bailing out
And NOTHING else. This is the ONLY error that it reports. I figured that there is some error in my code that doesn't get reported... So I will post the whole file where the problem is here:
ONXeWindow::ONXeWindow(int px, int py, int sw, int sh, bool resizable){
NSRect wr = NSMakeRect(px, py, sw, sh);
int wf = 1; // titled
wf += 2; // closable
wf += 4; // miniaturizable
wf += (resizable ? 8 : 0); // resizable
wf += (false ? 128 : 0); // metal bg
useWindow = [[NSWindow alloc] initWithContentRect:wr styleMask:wf backing:2 defer:YES];
}
Also, YES, framework AppKit was imported (in the header file) - I am not going to confuse you with my weird file scheme here.
The message isn't really cryptic, you just don't know the language (and don't care to, by your own admission).
Since Objective-C methods are dispatched dynamically at run-time, you can call a method that the compiler doesn't have any knowledge of, however, the compiler is warning you that you're doing so. The + in the beginning of the method name means that you're calling a class method (a - would indicate that you're calling a method on an instance). Since NSWindow has no class method named initWithContentRect:styleMask:backing:defer:, the compiler is giving you a warning, and in this case, it's a pretty good one.
You probably wrote something like:
NSWindow* myWindow = [NSWindow initWithContentRect:rect styleMask:0 backing:0 defer:NO];
when you meant to write something like:
NSWindow* myWindow = [[NSWindow alloc] initWithContentRect:rect styleMask:0 backing:0 defer:NO];
The first one sends the message directly to the class, but this is an instance method. You need to allocate an instance of NSWindow first, then send the init message. Also, clang tends to give much better warning and error messages than gcc. Clang 2.0 also handles C++ and ObjC++ pretty well, so it might be worth it to switch to clang.
Checkout this example, looks like you are not allocating your objects.

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