SU Ruby + XML

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.

pedrobaracho

Today I finally got Nokigiri working.

Summarizing everything that I had to do:

1- First attempt with LibXML failed, parsing process was halting inside the C code of libxml-ruby.
2- Switched to Nokigiri project. It was as fast as libxml and apparently, had less dependencies.
3- First attempt with Nokigiri failed. I couldn't find ilibgcj_s.dll
4- Second attempt with libxml-ruby: Failed... I wanted to debug the dll but that was too difficult to be achieved. Also I posted on this forum asking for help.

5- Still trying to solve the problem, I found out http://www.rubyinstaller.org on some random ruby-forum and got rubygems working under windows (I had never achieved that before).

6- Tried installing libxml the regular way: "gem install libxml-ruby"
7- Ran into a problem while compiling some of libxml-ruby`s dll.

8- Tried installing nokogiri the regular way: "gem install nokogiri"
9- Successfully installed nokogiri.
10- Build some ruby script to run over Ruby, using Nokogiri.
11- Ran ProcessMonitor (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx) and ProcessExplorer (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx) while using nokogiri objects over Ruby, so I could see what dlls it required.
11.2- Another good tool for tracing DLL dependencies is Dependency Viewer (http://www.foxprogramming.co.uk/freetools.html)

12- Copied these dlls to Sketchup folder and msvcrt-ruby18.dll from Ruby/bin. Sketchup folder is equivalent to Ruby/bin for Sketchup's Ruby interpreter. (This is a guess)
13- Put everything about Nokogiri on Sketchup's Plugin Folder (so it was loaded together with sketchup)
14- Started Sketchup.
15- Got lots of errors, due to dependencies. These errors were caused because Sketchup's Ruby Interpreter is not fully equipped with everything Ruby's own interpreter has.
16- Through the error messages of Sketchup, copied the rest of the .rb's and .so's needed for Nokogiri (that were installed by default on a regular Ruby installation).
17- No more errors. Successfully instantiated a Nokogiri::XML::Document object.

18- Rewrote my code so they would use Nokogiri instead of REXML.

My old parser, using REXML, was about 3 times slower than the new one using Nokogiri.
My library took 30-40 seconds to load with REXML and it takes 11 seconds to load with Nokogiri.
These weren't scientifically tests though. But they were good enough, and I measured it on at least 5 different computers.

Hope this helps anyone.

jhyuk

@pedrobaracho said:

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.

Has anyone found a solution to this problem?

pwatt01

Hello all,

I am also looking at creating a plugin which will import some data from a large (5OOmb+) XML file (provided by a third Party) I have the import script written using Nokogiri but am having trouble installing it in SU's ruby. I reda through pedrobaracho's post, and will give it some more attention to see if i can figure it out, but does anyone know if an easy, preferably native way to do this import?

sepultribe

@pwatt01 said:

Hello all,

I am also looking at creating a plugin which will import some data from a large (5OOmb+) XML file (provided by a third Party) I have the import script written using Nokogiri but am having trouble installing it in SU's ruby. I reda through pedrobaracho's post, and will give it some more attention to see if i can figure it out, but does anyone know if an easy, preferably native way to do this import?

I haven't tried pedrobaracho's way yet, but I think it's either that way (installing all required gem files inside your sketchup or plugin folder) or using an external ruby installation which will be the same version as your sketchup ruby version and editing the $LOAD_PATH variable to include that location. I'm also looking into this and I haven't completely figured it out myself. Good luck