I'm trying to (HTTP) upload a binary file programmatically from within VBA. I intend to put an ASPX page on the server to accept the file and certain additional parameters.
I know there are lots of nice ways to do that (e.g. use web service instead of aspx), but my constraint is that it must run in VBA (in an excel file), and that I cannot install any additional components on the client.
So I guess I'll use WinHTTP, and I've found several examples to post form data, but not to post a binary file. I probably need to base64 the file contents?
So my questions are:
Do I need to do the encoding manually or can I make WinHTTP do that?
Is there a better utility to use than WinHTTP? (Remember I don't want to install any additional software, it must be shipped with WinXP Pro, Office 2007 or a .NET framework, e.g.)
Is there a better way to go, e.g. using ASP.NET web services?
Thx, chiccodoro
You may use base64 but typically writing binary is easier.
The hurdle you have to leap is constructing a valid multi-par/form POST. This is completely possible using WinHTTP, although I have not done it in years and am not tooled to provide sample code, it is not trivial.
You can reference the following articles for examples of how to do this with C# HttpWebRequest. The WinHTTP api is a bit different of course but the salient points to take away from the articles is the structure of the POST body.
C# File Upload with form fields, cookies and headers (by yours truly)
UploadFileEx: C#'s WebClient.UploadFile with more functionality (a bit more procedural and may be easier to suss out the format)
Typically I provide sample code, but as I said, I do not have any stone-age tools set up right now ;-).
HTH
Related
Could you please let me know Any useful online resource to learns and implement some scenarios to explore more about it. Thanks.
Datapowers are historically, in order:
XML Tranformation acceleration Devices (that used to be a thing, XSLT was too slow to process)
SSL offloading devices (again, that used to be a thing, same reason)
Web site and Applications Gateways. Both web sites and web services security, concentrated around HTTP and SOAP/XML application layer mechanisms and standards (SSL/TLS, WS-S, SAML, etc.), but also token management, security conversion ... think "super SSO" + application security gateway
More specialized integration tools : Transformation of XML (with XSLT), Transformation to/from non-XML format (like CSV), Database connections, integration patterns (like routing, composing, and a LOT more). Some called the Datapower a lightweight ESB.
More specialized uses : B2B(EDI), JSON processing, REST/JSON support, API Mgmt (when used as deployment point for API Connect)
Notice that all later features needs the former ones (ESB is based on WS Security, etc.)
As you may know, most of Datapower devlopement is done with tranformations. The default, established language for them is XSLT (XQuery is also and historic, less popular option).
XSLT is both one of the most powerful and most horrible language to work with. Kind of like the Perl+REGEX of the XML world...
... but there is another problem with XSLT. It is not designed to work with JSON. Making the Datapower of 10 years ago heading for a fats retirement.
At first, IBM designed pseudo-XML ways of dealing with JSON. You could convert inbound JSON to XML and work with the JSON AS XML in XSLT. The inverse operation was to use XSLT to generate JSON... it worked perfectly but kind a looked like old school HTML/PHP merging code.
So IBM came up with a good idea: GatewayScript.
(Mostly based on many other good ideas)
GatewayScript is basically ECMAScript 2015 (ES6) + CommonJS 1.0 + Many super popular JS crypto libraries.
ECMAScript is obviously more known as JavaScript.
Pertaining to your question, the main advantage of GatewayScript is to enabled easier JSON Web Services Development of all the features in the list above, for modern REST/JSON APIs, instead of older (but still good) SOAP/XML Web Services.
GatewayScript has now been present for years, no longer a "beta" option.
Here are some other neat GatewayScript features:
Access to a DOM model, representing the incoming and outgoing version of the document, in simple JS notation.
Better errors in the logs when something does not work (you get the .js line number, unlike with the XSLT errors)
Better debugging options (you can enable a line-by-line debugger)
Some examples from the web written in Node.js and other JS frameworks can work... which is amazing
A very useful IBM site (Datapower Playground) where you can learn and test GatewayScripts examples without your own Datapower, à-la-w3cschool
And more.
I hope this helps.
GhislainCote's answer is very complete but basically GatewayScript is Node.js with an added framework for handling the session object which will contain your data/payload.
There are also some special objects, e.g. service-metadata and header-metadata that will contain DataPower variables and headers.
Sample scripts are available in the store:///gatewayscript/ directory and as the store:///healthcheck.js for example.
Also review the Knowledgecenter, it contains a lot of help and information about GatewayScript:
https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SS9H2Y_7.7.0/com.ibm.dp.doc/gatewayscript_model.html
GatewayScript is very powerful, I've coded support for AS2 de-/en-veloping (for customers not having the B2B Module option) and RosettaNet handling in GatewayScript so there is pretty much no limit to what you can achieve!
We're building an ASP.NET MVC application that is yet not localizable with a lot of Data Annotations DisplayAttribute with hard-coded strings and hard-coded message strings all over the code.
Now we have a requirement that the application must be localizable, but still, we need to allow the users to customize the field displays and the texts.
So far, I'm considering using RESX files with a custom IResourceProvider. Rick Strahl has written a good article about that. In this approach, the application is developed with standard RESX files, but in runtime, when the application need the strings, the custom provider will query the DB looking for customizations and will use them when found.
Even though it seems a good solution, it doesn't seem natural. I wonder if there's some better alternative.
Is there any standard for this?
What's not natural with using static values as defaults and checking database for localized ones? For me it's nice approach, because if someone will mess recources in db and, for example, remove one of them somehow, you'll always have a default text to display.
You can always do it in different way, by using only the db-based texts to not bother about changing defaults in your code and translations in database because it's easy to miss something when resources are in few places. When I was checking code of nopCommerce maybe 2 years ago, I've seen that when they do localization with resources from database only. I'm not sure how it's done now, but you can download source code and check it.
In WinForms app I developed a year ago I was using XML files for different languages because our customer wanted to be able to allow non-technical natives to create new language files. And I created localization tool built-in into app, but for websites it's best to use database, as you already have access to this and can easily manipulate data.
You can read more about this topic in this blog post.
I'm writing a web app in Scala using the Play framework. I'd like to be able to push some binary data to my web server from another machine I'm using to do number crunching. I'd like to do this over http. Can anyone suggest the best way to do each side? Ideas that have occurred to me so far are:
Send the data up as a file upload via the usual play form processing. Nice on the (web) server side, but I'm not sure what libraries to use for pushing the data up from the (number crunching) client. In C/C++ I'd consider using Curl.
Send the data up as raw POST with the binary attached and encoded appropriately. Not sure how to do either side.
I've done each of the above on several occasions in Python and C++ (although not recently enough to remember how!), but am not a web dev (but a more general sw engineer) and have only ever had control of one side before - so have no idea what the best way to do this is.
Any thoughts appreciated.
Alex
It depends what platform (and language) you're already using for the number-crunching client part. If that 'client' is also using the Play framework (or at least has access to the libraries), then there are some very helpful tools for accessing web services; (see here also).
Hi
I’m trying to develop an E-Paper website using .Net. But At first the content of the website need to grab from the Quark file. What is the procedure to get the content from the Quark file according to the Layout?
So it would be highly appreciated to provide some information regarding this subject.
Thanks…
This is going to be a tough project since the QuarkXpress files are 1) proprietary and therefore are not well documented, and 2) binary so the data is harder to get at. This will require a lot more work than a post on StackOverflow.com can help with.
First, ASP.NET really isn't the right framework for it. At least, you should develop this as a C# or VB code library project which is then consumed by a ASP.NET web application.
In order to parse the file, you might want to start off by reading Reverse engineering the Quark Xpress file format. This forum, Code for QuarkXPress file format support, also seems to have some good information. You will want to use what you learn from those articles to parse the binary and convert it to the proper types or structures. Here on some links on how to parse binary files in C#:
http://www.dotnetperls.com/binaryreader
Read binary file into a struct
http://www.yoda.arachsys.com/csharp/readbinary.html
You may also want to check out this forum posting on How to create dynamic QuarkXPress files in .Net FrameWork C#. It seems that Quark has a C# API for dealing with Quark files if you have QuarkXpress Server.
I'm thinking of developing the following but wondering if it already exists out there:
I need a SQL based solution for assigning and managing localization text values for an asp.net site instead of using RESX files. This helps maintain text on the site without having to take it down for deployment whenever an update is required.
Thanks.
We actually went down that path, and ended up with a really really slow web site - ripping out the SQL-based translation mechanism and using the ASP.NET resources gave us a significant performance boost. So I can't really recommend you do that same thing.... (and yes - we were caching and optimizing for throughput and everything - and the SQL based stuff was still significantly slower).
You get what you pay for - the SQL based approach was more flexible in terms of being able to "translate" on the fly, and fix typos and stuff. But in the end, in our app (Webforms, .NET 2.0 at that time), using resources proved to be the only viable way to go.
We did this (SQL-Based Translation) and we are really happy with the result! We developed an interface for translation-agencies to perform the updates to the page online. As a side effect, the solution started to serve as content-management system. If you cache your data, performance is not an issue. The downside is, that we invested multiple hundreds of hours into our solution. (I would guess sth. arround 600 hours, but I could check.).
We ended up with a hybrid solution where users could edit content into a database but the application then created a .resx which was deployed manually.
You could also bypass the server translation altogether and do translation in jQuery on the client which is an approach I have used successfully.
I'm not sure about the website restart, but at least using .NET MVC is very convenient and I haven't noticed that restart problem, and, if occurs, how often you need to update the resx files? For bigger projects I use to create a solution with multiple projects, one for the localization, something like this:
MyApp.Localization
Model
Page
File1.resx
MyApp.Core
MyApp.Web
Then in the Web project I add a reference to the Localization project, and use it like
#MyApp.Localization.Model.Customer.CustomerName
#MyApp.Localization.Page.About.PageTitle
#MyApp.Localization.File1.Paragraph1
Everytime I change the translated text, I either upload an updated .dll or copy the .resx files.
NOTE: You need to set your resx files to PUBLIC, so can be accessed as strongly typed.
I created a SQL based translation scheme. But I only load the needed translations for a given page when it is requested, and just the ones for that particular page.
Those get loaded into a dictionary object when the page reloads and cached during the session. Then is just does text replacement based off a lookup on that.
Pretty much all of it is dynamically generated, and includes user defined content that must be translated, so the flexibility is key.
Performance is quite fast, the SQL queries to retrieve all the data take much longer (relatively speaking).