>From: Victor Hooi >Sent: Tue, April 19, 2011 1:21:34 AM > Victor -
> We have an application with it's configuration stored across a > number of XML files. > > Currently, I'm finding generateDS incredibly useful for processing > and working with the .XSD schema files =). > > My question is - I was thinking of writing a GUI wrapper to edit the > XML configuration files. Since it's Python, PyQT seemed like a > natural fit for a GUI toolkit for this. > > Do you perhaps have any advice or experience to share on this? Or > know of anybody who did something similar? Shortcuts? > > It seems like a fairly common use-case - however I'm not quite sure > how I should design a PyQT GUI using the generateDS output, that's > generic and introspecty enough, without hardcoding in the > structure/semantics of the XML file? Any help at all is greatly > appreciated. Sounds like an appropriate use case for the use of generateDS.py. You might want to think of generateDS.py, once you have generated bindings (Python classes), helps you do the following: 1. Read and parse an XML instance document, creating a tree of instances of (generated) Python classes. 2. Extract data items from the tree. 3. Insert data items into the tree. 4. Serialize the tree to a string, or write (export) the tree to a file (an XML instance doc). It seems to me that it's likely that these are kinds of assistance you'll want. The choice of GUI toolkit is up to you. PyQT, WxPython, and PyGTK/glade are all appropriate, depending on what you feel best working with and what would be appropriate to install on your users' machines. All generateDS.py is doing is generating a module/library that you can import and use in you GUI (or other application) to access the configuration data. By the way, the generateDS.py distribution contains a GUI application, generateds_gui.py, written with PyGTK and glade. There is currently a problem with that application: the current version of the Gtk library is missing a feature that I depended on when I implemented generateds_gui.py using an earlier version of the Gtk libraries, so currently you can define and save a session file, but cannot read/load a session file. Anyway, a session file is, from your point of view, basically a configuration. And, generateds_gui.py uses a small module/library that I generated with generateDS.py to read, extract items from, update, and write out an XML file. The only advice I can give you about trying to avoid hard code access to each different configuration file might be this -- If you have or think you will have a need to do configuration on different configuration files, then you might think about extracting from XML to a flat file format or to an array in memory that has a common format. 1. Extract to and from CSV format files or some other flat file format. generateDS.py is a good tool for this transformation. Or, you could even use XSL-T. 2. Write your GUI application using this more uniform, common data format, either one in memory or one from a file. With respect to hard coding, the current problem in generateds_gui.py has to do with a "trick" I used to avoid having to write code (hard coding?) specific to each different value within a session. Recent versions of PyGtk dropped support for access to the names of GUI objects, and I had relied on that. So, you'd have to be careful about that if you use PyGtk. But, other than that, I thought that PyGtk plus glade was a good toolkit. Hope this helps. Let me know if I can answer additional questions. - Dave -- Dave Kuhlman http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Benefiting from Server Virtualization: Beyond Initial Workload Consolidation -- Increasing the use of server virtualization is a top priority.Virtualization can reduce costs, simplify management, and improve application availability and disaster protection. Learn more about boosting the value of server virtualization. http://p.sf.net/sfu/vmware-sfdev2dev _______________________________________________ generateds-users mailing list generateds-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/generateds-users
