Sunday, July 25, 2010

Windows Auto-Updaters

If anyone from Microsoft reads this I have a pretty simple feature request for Windows 8. Windows desperately needs some for of auto-update api. On my current Win7 install right now I have this situation:

Chrome: has their own updater

Firefox: has their own updater

Winamp: has their own updater

Flash: has their own updater

Digsby: has it’s own updater

iTunes: has their own updater

… etc.

 

Aside from all these programs requiring memory resident services in order to maintain the periodic update check the main annoyance is that each of these updates bug you at different times through a different interface about the programs they know about.

Since updating and patching for security flaws is a common thing in the modern application world this would be a big benefit to users of Microsoft products if there’s a centralized way of alerting the user of new changes. If it could be listed along with the standard windows update interface all the better (maybe a third party applications section).

I would submit to Microsoft directly but it doesn’t appear they have a feature request page in a casual search of the Microsoft Windows divisions site.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Reading Android XML Resources

I’ve been playing recently with some Android development and recently I needed to load an XML resource (for API 3). I was very surprised to find that Android doesn’t have a super easy way of loading XML resource files.

The XMLPullParser works but it’s very bare metal and does leave quite a bit to be desired. So I decided to go ahead and create a generic XML parser that all android developers can use (and improve).




public class XMLData {
    public String mValue;
    public XMLData mParent;
    public List mChild;
   
    public XMLData(String value, XMLData parent) {
        mParent = parent;
        mChild = new ArrayList();
        mValue = value;
    }
}   



First we establish a base XML data structure I decided to keep things simple here so I'm not at all doing anything about attributes if you wish to handle attributes you need to add a new ArrayList for attributes.

Now that we have our basic XML data type we can start create a class to read it:


    public static XMLData Load(XmlPullParser parser) {
        XMLData xmlModel = null;
        XMLData currentNode = null;
       
        try
        {
            int eventType = parser.getEventType();
           
            while (eventType != XmlPullParser.END_DOCUMENT){
                String name = null;
                    switch (eventType)    {
                        case XmlPullParser.START_DOCUMENT:
                            xmlModel = new XMLData("root", null);
                            currentNode = xmlModel;
                            break;
                        case XmlPullParser.START_TAG:
                            name = parser.getName();
                           
                            if (name != null) {
                                XMLData dataNode = new XMLData(name, currentNode);
                                currentNode.mChild.add(dataNode);
                                currentNode = dataNode;
                            }
                            break;
                           
                        case XmlPullParser.TEXT:
                            name = parser.getText();
                           
                            if (name != null) {
                                XMLData fieldNode = new XMLData(name,currentNode);
                                currentNode.mChild.add(fieldNode);
                            }
                            break;
                           
                        case XmlPullParser.END_TAG:
                            name = parser.getName();
                           
                            currentNode = currentNode.mParent;
                            break;
                    }
                   
                    eventType = parser.next();
            }
        } catch (XmlPullParserException e) {
            Log.e("ParseEx", e.getMessage());
        } catch (IOException e) {
            Log.e("IOEx", e.getMessage());
        }
       

        return xmlModel;
    }



So let's back up for a second and look at what this does. We start off by first executing:

int eventType = parser.getEventType();

This reads off our first tag for the XMLPullParser.what follows is the main while loop.

There are 4 Major event types we are concerned with:

XmlPullParser.START_DOCUMENT
XmlPullParser.END_DOCUMENT
XmlPullParser.START_TAG
XmlPullParser.END_TAG
XmlPullParser.TEXT

START_DOCUMENT and END_DOCUMENT denote the beginning and end of the document when we get a start we concern ourselves with initializing the XMLData so we can start to build an XML tree.

START_TAG and END_TAG denote when each of the tags expand. On a START_TAG we prepare ourselves to traverse into the ENTRY by creating a new XMLData.


 case XmlPullParser.START_TAG:
             name = parser.getName();
                            
             if (name != null) {
                XMLData dataNode = new XMLData(name, currentNode);
                currentNode.mChild.add(dataNode);
                currentNode = dataNode;
             }
             break;



dataNode in this case is the newly created node ready for traversal. We then perform currentNode = dataNode remember that we are now traversing down the node.

On END_TAG we do one and only one thing we go up one level from our tree structure. This is accomplished with the following code:


         case XmlPullParser.END_TAG:
            name = parser.getName();
                           
            currentNode = currentNode.mParent;
            break;



Finally we have TEXT in which we read off the actuall data of an element:


     case XmlPullParser.TEXT:
         name = parser.getText();

                   
         if (name != null) { 

             XMLData fieldNode = new XMLData(name,currentNode);
             currentNode.mChild.add(fieldNode);
         }
         break;




Hopefully this tutorial breaks down an easy way to access your XML data. If you want to use XMLData right away you can grab it here! I haven't decided what license I'll release it under but I'm thinking it'll be under the same license as Google SDK.

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