I have an addin in Autodesk Revit that automates some stuff for me, e.g. it exports a file to a given location (.dwg file).
within Autocad i have an addin as well, that needs to process the specific export.
I know how to write/code addins for both software independent, but i am wondering if it is possible to send a command from one addin to the other, where both addins live in an different software program. So in my case, i want to sent an command from my Revit addin, to my Autocad addin.
Is it possible to make some kind of listener of trigger?
Yes, there are many ways to do that, and they have nothing whatsoever to do with the Revit or AutoCAD APIs.
One traditional way to send messages between different applications is to use a so-called pipe: named pipe, anonymous.
There are many other methods as well.
Have you looked into TECHSOFT3D's RealDWG library? It is the only tool that I know of that will allow you to read/write dwg files from outside of AutoCAD. It has the exact same functions as the AutoCAD API excluding any user interface or printing functionality. I use it as part of an all-in-one Revit add-in so that I can do post-processing of a dwg file after it has been generated using the Revit API export functionality. That way I don't need to have a separate AutoCAD add-in and I don't have to worry about handling different versions of both Revit AND AutoCAD. Note, however, that RealDWG is not free.
Related
I am developing a ASPNET web app which uses interop for different tasks. In order to make the app faster I was wondering if I can run Excel on the background while the view is loading. I tried the following approach:
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However, every time you go into the view the app is initializated so you have the app running many times in the background. Is there a way of doing it?
Thanks!
Microsoft does not currently recommend, and does not support, Automation of Microsoft Office applications from any unattended, non-interactive client application or component (including ASP, ASP.NET, DCOM, and NT Services), because Office may exhibit unstable behavior and/or deadlock when Office is run in this environment.
If you are building a solution that runs in a server-side context, you should try to use components that have been made safe for unattended execution. Or, you should try to find alternatives that allow at least part of the code to run client-side. If you use an Office application from a server-side solution, the application will lack many of the necessary capabilities to run successfully. Additionally, you will be taking risks with the stability of your overall solution. Read more about that in the Considerations for server-side Automation of Office article.
As a workaround, you may consider using the Open XML SDK for open XML documents or third-party components designed for the server-side execution.
I’m trying to use Lua/Moonsharp API scripting. There’s a command library, but there isn’t a function that I need. My question is, am I able to create my own function, or am I limited to what’s been written?
Specifically, for a software called BobCAD a Lua plugin is available. There are lists of commands like Bcc.SetCamObjParameter, though, there isn’t the command that I need. I’m assuming that some aspects of the BobCAD software are inaccessible to API, but am I limited to the library in this plugin, or can I add my own commands? I thought that there would be some C# file somewhere in the program directory where I can read the functions and possibly learn how to create my own, but I don’t see anything like that. (Or are scripting functions set up internally to the software, and I’m only given access to what has been provided?)
(N.b. I'm not familiar with BobCAD specifically, but this answer should be generally applicable.)
Generally speaking, for use cases like this (where Lua scripting is provided as part of a larger program, or by a plugin for a larger program), it's the developer of the program or plugin who decides what API is available to Lua. In the latter case they may also be limited by what the program's plugin API allows; in the case of BobCAD you are likely limited to what the BobCAD plugin API permits, and then further limited by what parts of that API the developers of the Lua plugin chose to make available to Lua itself.
You can of course write your own functions in Lua, but in terms of actually talking to the host program you are restricted to the API that program makes available, unless they make available some mechanism (like LuaJIT's Foreign Function Interface) for reaching into the program from Lua and calling functions that were not made explicitly available -- which most do not.
As for finding "a C# file somewhere in the program directory" -- C# is a compiled language; C# libraries are generally shipped as pre-compiled CLR binaries (with a .dll extension) and do not contain source code. If the source code for BobCAD and/or the Lua plugin is available you could always modify it and re-compile it, but as BobCAD is commercial, closed-source software, I would not expect it to be available.
At that point, your options are basically:
figure out a way to do what you need with the commands that are available;
try to reverse engineer enough of the program to do what you need without access to the source code;
or look for another program that has the features you need.
I have written a UI in Electron and I would like to connect it with my C++ code. However, I will be selling this product and so I would like to know if this makes it easier for people to crack my C++ code? Obviously I know compiled C++ can be cracked anyway, but does this affect it in any way?
Additionally, what is the best way to go about this while preserving maximum possible security?
Thanks.
EDIT: How about this? Is it possible to use c++ as back-end for Electron.js?
EDIT2: To clarify, my Electron app will be showing the status of operations being performed in the C++ program. As such, I will need to send lists, dictionaries, strings etc. from C++ to JS which will then render it. Additionally, buttons on my Electron app need to trigger actions in the C++ code, such as stopping or starting certain parts of the program.
I have written a UI in Electron and I would like to connect it with my C++ code ...
I would like to know if this makes it easier for people to crack my C++ code?
Using electron does not make any meaningful difference for protecting the C++ source code. (Your intellectual property)
The Javascript code running in electron will be very easy to reverse engineer though, which gives users a head start on experimenting with your C++ binary. Using minification and obfuscation tools can at least make that harder.
For the C++ side, connecting C++ to Electron can be done in at least these two ways:
By dynamically linking to a shared library (Node.js C++ Addons)
In this case your C++ API would be functions that get exported by the shared library. There are many tools to inspect shared libraries (DLLs) and view these functions.
By communicating with another process using some sort of Inter-process communication.
In this case your API would depend on the IPC method used. If it was TCP/UDP messages you could use Wireshark to inspect the packets between the processes. There are ways to inspect messages going over any type of IPC.
Either way, your application must be delivered to the end-user with a compiled binary. Preventing reverse engineering of the binary itself is impossible if you actually give the binary to your users.
You should also expect that a savvy end-user will have access to other tools that can inspect the API and implement third-party code that talks to that API.
Additionally, what is the best way to go about this while preserving maximum possible security?
By "maximum possible security", I will assume you are referring to preventing unauthorized use of the C++ code with other applications.
You would need a licensing system that can authenticate the application that is using your C++ binary's API. Explaining what that would be exactly is probably too large of an answer for a Stack Overflow, and you will have to do some research on how licensing systems are implemented.
It may be theoretically impossible to develop a perfect licensing system though. Look at the gaming industry, it takes just a matter of days to for the licensing software become circumvented for every new game that is released. The only software architecture that cracks haven't completely conquered are cloud-based applications, which don't actually deliver compiled code with their business logic to the end-user's computer.
I would like to use open office to convert to and from MS office. I have been using Open Office's UNO API. The problem with this is that it requires OO to be running in a daemon mode. OO keeps crashing on me and I need to have a dedicated monitoring process to keep OO up.
I was wondering if it would be possible to just extract the filter layer in OO and use this library in my project to do the conversions.
Alternatively is there any command line way of doing doc conversions without having to have the whole OO app running as a server.
The usual approach is to include code that starts the OO server if it is not already running.
However if it is crashing frequently you ought to figure out why.
I'm currently starting to integrate "Delphi Web Script" in my application basically only as a scripting engine (interfacing with functions, classes, etc.); awesome software for the standard delphi open source quality in my opinion, but just for curiosity,
What's exactly the "web part" of the project?
How is intended to be used?
It was used somewhere with some success commercially?
Thanks!
As ain said, the original use was for PHP-like, ASP-like server-side web-page generation, but it was also capable of general purpose use, which is what I used it for. And as I did not use the "web" side of DWScript, most of the "web-oriented" features haven't been ported over (only the HTML Filter was ported actually).
The Web functionality is still available in the SourceForge repository, if someone wants to tackle the port. Though, they may be outdated beyond simple renamed methods and classes, as since DWSII, the script engine has gained various features. For instance, it is now capable of multiple thread-safe executions of a single compiled script, while the old codebase is built around the limitation that a compiled script can be executed by only one thread at a time.
On the other hand, there are some new features that could simplify the porting, the simple WebServer demo recently added uses RTTI to expose TWebResponse & TWebRequest f.i. (was manually exposed in DWSII). On the down side, that's only possible with recent Delphi versions.
AFAIK the main focus of the original author of this scripting engine was to make it possible to embed Pascal scripts into HTML pages, just like ie PHP does it. Hence the name "Delphi Web Script". While the focus of the current maintainer, Eric Grange, is on using it as a general purpose scripting engine, it should still be possible to use it for web purposes as well - for that you use the "filters" feature of the library. Check out the dwsHtmlFilter unit for HTML filter.