SU Ruby + XML

tbd

These XML packages - are they PC only?

almost everything that needs speed in Ruby is implemented as an extension, so it is platform dependent. some gems are precompiled (e.g. for Windows), others are in source form and compiled on user machine to gather additional speed on optimizations (e.g. Mac)

http://github.com/jnunemaker/happymapper sounds interesting but again, has a lot of requirements

thomthom

Seeing how getting an XML parser working I think I will go for a custom format and make a simple parser that creates nested Hashes. In fact, I have to make my own Hash object as I want to traverse the Hash in the order the items where inserted.

But I'd still like to be able to read XML data from SU ruby. There's some other projects I'd like to use it which involves reading existing XML based files.

Pout

and? did you manage to get something working that could parse xml?

thomthom

No - I've still not found a good solution.

AdamB

Thomthom, what do you actually want?

If you don't need the full DOM, then these big (often slow) XML parsers may be a hammer to crack a nut.

If you're just looking to use XML as a simple text mark-up of parameters etc, then writing something in Ruby that yanks out tag-value pairs would be trivial.

thomthom

You got a point there. It's mostly simple XML files with tags and attributes.
Could make a simple reader and writer. Make a custom class that holds values and attributes, read the XML file as a nested object.
K.I.S.S.

todd burch

I write an xml file in ruby, pass it to my webdialog, and use the browser to parse the xml and generate my html table dynamically.

Works awesome.

MartinRinehart

@unknownuser said:

I write an xml file in ruby, pass it to my webdialog, and use the browser to parse the xml and generate my html table dynamically.

Works awesome.

Todd, you're working too hard. Replace the XML with JSON (no harder, may be easier in Ruby), pass it to your WebDialog and "parse the XML" is just eval( foo = json ). If json is a valid JavaScript object, even a complex one nesting arrays and other objects as properties (that in turn nest other ...), you're done.

todd burch

No, I'm working smart. With what I am doing with XML, I can allow user customization of the entire dialog for table layout, ordering, field values, content, etc., and never have to touch how my ruby script generates the data again.

Pout

So you import the xml file into the webdialog and in there you parse it? With a javascript script or something else?
I'm getting lost here.

todd burch

@pout said:

So you import the xml file into the webdialog and in there you parse it? With a javascript script or something else?
I'm getting lost here.

I display a webdialog. In the webdialog, on some user action, (a javascript event), a javascript function calls a Ruby callback, which iterates over the SketchUp model and builds an XML document of it. Then, the callback finished by setting a javascript variable with the xml document. Then, back in javascript, I call the browser to parse the XML document. I then (in javascript) iterate over the parsed document to build my dynamic html <table>.

Todd

MartinRinehart

@unknownuser said:

a Ruby callback, which iterates over the SketchUp model and builds an XML document of it

Why is XML better than JSON?

todd burch

It's not that XML is better or JSON is better. Forward thinking, XML is what I chose to use.

XML does, however, interface with the rest of the world better than JSON.

Pout

@unknownuser said:

@pout said:

So you import the xml file into the webdialog and in there you parse it? With a javascript script or something else?
I'm getting lost here.

I display a webdialog. In the webdialog, on some user action, (a javascript event), a javascript function calls a Ruby callback, which iterates over the SketchUp model and builds an XML document of it. Then, the callback finished by setting a javascript variable with the xml document. Then, back in javascript, I call the browser to parse the XML document. I then (in javascript) iterate over the parsed document to build my dynamic html <table>.

Todd

ok, i get this.
But different browsers have different ways to parse XML data.
What kind of code do you use so each browser can handle the xml?
In my case i want to import an xml.
So i parse it with the webbrowser of the webdialog. But due to the several possible browsers (IE 5-6-7, Safari, FF, ...) this is so difficult to manage.
Do you have a cross browser script that reads XML files?

thomthom

@pout said:

But due to the several possible browsers (IE 5-6-7, Safari, FF, ...) this is so difficult to manage.

IE and webkit is the only options.

Pout

Hey ThomThom,

Can you explain a bit more?
Thx

thomthom

With Webdialogs you only deal with IE (under Windows) and webkit (under OSX). All other browsers are irrelevant.

todd burch

@unknownuser said:

It's not that XML is better or JSON is better. Forward thinking, XML is what I chose to use.

XML does, however, interface with the rest of the world better than JSON.

Comparison between XML and JSON: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Json#XML

Pout, Google LoadXML (for Windows) and DOMParser for Safari.

Or, see these links:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.xml.xmldocument.loadxml.aspx
http://www.w3schools.com/dom/dom_parser.asp

Pout

Todd,

Tll now i was using:

xmlDoc=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM");
xmlDoc.async="false";
xmlDoc.onreadystatechange = readXML;
xmlDoc.load(url);

function readXML()
{
   if(xmlDoc.readyState == 4)
   {
	_extractxml();
	}
}

for windows/IE, did work, but also show script time execution errors.
Let's see if LoadXML is better

Thanks for the links! Much appreciated

pedrobaracho

I got LibXML-Ruby working with SU.
What I needed to get it working was:
Get http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/53633/libxml-ruby-1.1.3-x86-mswin32-60.gem
From lib folder
libxml folder
xml folder
libxml.rb
xml.rb
From ext/mingw folder
libiconv-2.dll
libxml_ruby.so
libxml2-2.dll
From Ruby folder:
stringio.rb
zlib1.dll

I succeeded parsing a big file, although I couldn't parse multiple files in a row.
The problem is when I parse 4 files in a row, libxml stucks while creating the Document object.

LibXML::XML::Document.new(file).root

And it gets non-responsive. Also it blocks the SU process and it doesn't finish when I close SU.

I also didn't get any times to compare rexml and libxml running over SU.

If anybody has any hints to my problem, I would appreciate it. Right now I am trying to compile libxml-ruby and set up some breakpoints so I can see where it is halting the execution.