I have an old software that I believe was done in Delphi and uses .rep files for reports.
Is there any way to figure out what report builder was used? Opening the file in HEX or Text only doesn't really tell a lot, it shows quite some text that is used within the report though.
Thanks
Patrick
Candidates:
A Visual dBase file, it that case it should be mainly ASCII text, but your question seems to rule that out.
A (SAP) Business Objects Report file
An Act! (CRM software) report file
A Grand Theft Auto San Andreas game replay file.
Since you say it is 'used for report', BO is your best bet. It was acquired by SAP in 2007, before that it was standalone software produced by Business Objects AG.
So you probably need a copy of that to open the file.
Maybe there are other ways to inspect/use the file, other people have faced the same problem
Quite simply without access to the source code, you have no way of knowing. None of the major third party Delphi reporting components (Quick Reports, Rave, Crystal, Report Builder, Fast Reports/Free Report) I'm aware of use *.rep as their default file extension. That isn't to say that the program authors didn't use one of these components, but opted to replace the tool's default extension with *.rep. There's also the possibility that the program's authors used their own custom and proprietary reporting system.
You could potentially take one of these .Rep files and try and load them into each Delphi reporting tool and see what the results are but I think your chances of success are exceedingly low.
Related
I have been asked to update a program written in 1987 in Delphi (I guess). I have no documentation about this program only a few side notes the programmer took that don't make too much sense to make.
The cd show this files:
Size | Filename
19956 VP.DTA
142300 VP.LEX
404 VP.NDX
126502 VP.RCS
131016 VP.SCR
150067 VP.XEL
101791 vp.exe
Is anyone of this files a database? If so can I access it's data?
I tried several code decompilers but they show a message saying it was not a Win32 compatible application.
The program run in MS-DOS.
Is it possible to obtain the source code? Can I use this code in any way to build a new application?
Update01: I can run the program in MS-DOS. The program conjugate verbs and shows an example sentence where the verb can be used. The GUI is a little bit confusing and there is no help menu so I can't see all the capabilities of the program.
Update02: In conversation with the owner of the program we found another solution. He ask me if it was possible to have the program in a server and the clients could login in with a user and a password and execute the program in a terminal. I have an account in my university server, which I can access throughout ssh and compile and execute c programs in it. The server is in linux so I couldn't try the program in it. If I set up a windows server, can I have multiple people accessing and executing the program in a terminal? The program is an exe. Doesn't this raise some security issues?
Delphi is from mid nineties, so that probably means Delphi's ancestor Turbo Pascal, not Delphi.
Some extensions sound familiar, as shortened versions of words:
ndx = index
dta = data
scr = screen (?)
lex = lexicon (list of words or deduped strings in general) (?)
Screen was sometimes used for e.g. helpscreens, a medieval form of helpfiles, they are typicall ansi screens that can be loaded directly into screen memory
There is a fair chance that this is something handcrafted, specially if that date of 1987 and the general assumption "pascal" is true, and not generated by some known database package at all.
Reverseengineering the fileformat might be a more worthwhile way than trying to reverseengineering the app.
A good start would to be to take a the unix "file" command to see if it can recognize the file types. (the file command searches for signatures inside files, and there are windows ports. I use Cygwin's)
A devel experienced in such matters can also see a lot from a hexdump (specially the first parts of a file)
Is it possible to obtain the source code?
Probably not, you may want to look at something like IDA Pro which can disassemble applications to C using something like Hex-Rays.
Do you know what the application is supposed to be?
If it's ms-dos, you're probably better off just drawing up new requirements and doing new development.
Look for DeDe to reverse engineering a delphi compiled program. But as far as i know, delphi is a real compiler. So there is no way to de-compiled it. If you are able to read assembler code then you can try de-compile it. Clipper and Foxpro (dos version) are another stories cause they not real compiler.
This is definitely not Delphi. It might be one of the database centric languages like Clipper 1. .SCR probably means "screen" and defines I/O masks. .NDX is a table index and .DTA means "data".
If it is clipper, you might actually be lucky, because as far as I remember these programs were P code, so it could be possible to decompile it.
It looks like CLipper (NDX and SCR). If you have a DBF file then it's Clipper for sure. But some people renamed the DBF to something like DAT. If it is Clipper, I believe there was a decompile named Valkyrie.
Using Delphi 7, I wonder if there is a free component which will collect diagnostic information as my application runs at a remote site and will help me to debug error reports.
Maybe it records each menu item selected, control clicked, text input, etc? Maybe it just dumps the stack on a crash. Maybe it does something else ...
I don't mind adding code (e.g at the start and end of each procedure), as that might generate more useful info than a fully automatic system.
I am not sure if the solution ought to "phone home" or if it is enough to produce a text file which can be emailed to me.
Any suggestions?
with the crash debuging have a look at MadExcept
http://www.madshi.net/madExceptDescription.htm
madExcept was built to help you locating crashes in your software. Whenever there's a crash/exception in your program, madExcept will automatically catch it, analyze it, collect lots of useful information, and give the end user the possibility to send you a full bug report.
free for non-commercial usage, inexpensive for commercial usage
or JclDebug from the JEDI Code Library
http://www.delphi-jedi.org/
A Blog Posting about it can be found here
http://www.gnegg.ch/2002/12/jcldebug/
EDIT: This seems to be a very good example on how to use JCLDebug
http://robstechcorner.blogspot.com/2009/04/finding-hard-to-reproduce-errors.html
I use EurekaLog http://www.eurekalog.com
It does the call stack, memory contents, other apps running, a good description of the machine, OS, patches, etc.., It can (with user permission, and if configured to to so) take a screenshot, ask the user for input (what were you doing when it crashed?), etc.. It can send the dump via e-mail, post to http, post directly to bug trackers like Mantis and FogBugz, or just leave it on the system. It's great, and well supported.
Also, here's a link to a similar question
Compare Delphi Exception Handlers
Have you looked at the open-source JclDebug from Project Jedi? Here's a nice succinct write-up on JclDebug.
Imagine you could get a detailed
error-report containing a full
callstack of where the error occured
combined with information about file
and line-number. This report could be
generated directly on the users
computer and be sent to you via email
or directly via the internet, using a
custom procedure - even directly
creating entries in the
bugtracking-tool you are using.
This and more is made possible by the
Project JEDI - more accuratly, the
JCL-Subproject with its
JclDebug-Framework. When you have
completed the installation of the
package, a new Menu Option called
"Inser JCL Debug Data" will be added
to the Project-Menu of your
Delphi-IDE.
There is a great delphi porting of the most known opensource logging framework written in java, Log4J: it is called Log4Delphi.
http://log4delphi.sourceforge.net
I downloaded it, extended and used with my projects with success.
Best features: opensource, Apache license, very well documented, simple to extend it, power design: with the concept of appender, you could build up your custom appender and use it to send logging data from remote customer computer to your head quarter using UDP protocol.
Try it, and let me know :-)
PS: the project seems to be discontinued, but it is mature and I'd used it without memory overload and cpu overhead problems.
The log4Delphi project has been dormant for 4 years but I have been granted access to update the dormant Log4Delphi project and I have rolled up 4 years of bugfixes and patches into the latest 0.8 release available on Source-forge. I use this library in production and have found it to very stable and reliable and easy to use.
Log4Delphi Downloads Page
Is there currently a feature that allows a exclusive checkout in SVN?
Is there a good plugin for Delphi that allows the access via IDE?
SVN has a concept of "locking" which roughly corresponds to the exclusive checkout. For example, in TortoiseSVN this is exposed via Get lock and Release lock menu entries.
JCL contains a SVN version control expert which works quite fine. Besides other things, tt gives you access to the locking functionality from the IDE.
TortoiseSVN can be added into the Delphi tools menu. I've not tried this myself, since I'm happy using it as an Explorer extension.
Regarding the exclusive checkout, I'm guessing you mean so only one person can edit it at a time? That's not really the idea behind Subversion, the idea is you have working copies and then check in your changes. It'll then try to merge your changes in (this usually works most of the time). If there are conflicts you'll need to resolve them manually.
I believe one of the reasons why people sometimes enquire about locking items in a Subversion repository is because they have their Delphi DFMs saved in a binary format, which makes committing/merging problematic.
An alternative to changing DFMs etc to text is use Scooter Software's Beyond Compare.
Beyond Compare is written in Delphi, and natively knows how to read binary DFMs. This means that it then becomes less of an issue (or even no issue) whether your DFMs are stored in Subversion in binary or text. Beyond Compare V3 also does 3-way merging which makes it really easy to merge multiple commits etc. Even ignoring the ability to diff binary DFMs, it's still a much better diff viewer than TortoiseSVN's built-in tools. I can highly recommend it, and it's very inexpensive.
Currently the only things that I lock in our repository are COM type libraries (*.tlb and their associated *_TLB.pas files).
Regarding exclusive checkouts. It can be done, but it's a pain and generally not worth the time. If you do have dfms saved as binary, convert them to text.
Regarding delphi addins, I have a post at Delphi addins for subversion.
I use the jedi jcl, and TortoiseSvn.
There are also Delphi svn and Delphi addin in for Tortoise svn that I know of.
Maybe I'm naive, but why would anyone want to go to the enormous trouble of merging their changes? Merging might be a simple matter if programmers were editing text files whose contents are easily understood, and which therefore could be merged by virtue of the programmers knowing the meanings of the changes. However if you're using SVN with MS Visual Studio, where changes to one file frequently case changes to other files you didn't know about, and where the encoding of information in such files may be completely unknown to the programmers (who would therefore have no concept of how to interpret much less merge such files) and may even be binary, why would you go to the enormous trouble and risk of having multiple people simultaneously editing things?
The locking paradigm is simple. Only one person edits at a time. Merging is never required. Programmers don't need to know the encodings of (possibly binary) files that they don't even realize that they're modifying. Nobody can stomp on anyone else's changes. Locking (i.e. locking by default) sounds much preferable to me.
What do you mean by "exclusive checkout"? Do you mean that after you check out, nobody else can check out?
That's called a lock and subversion can do this (see Locking), though it's not recommended in general as the purpose of version control is to allow multiple people to simultaneously work on the versioned item.
For first part, I was using Visual Source Safe which is support locking (you have to check out before use), SVN has locking command, but it's against it's concept, you need few time to get used with it, and you will never use the locking command again.
For second part of your question, The TortoiseSVN can be used as external tool, or you can get it working with File Browser bundled with Delphi 2007 and above, and you can use IBrowser which work with older versions.
and Subversion add-ins for Delphi summarize the available SVN plug-ins for Delphi IDE, beside SourceConneXion which is commercial product.
Is there are any open source or free-ware library to display PDF file in my Delphi program?
I had looked for one, but most of them are commercial or not fully functional.
PS: this solution need to be cross platform by using wine.
One possible solution might be to include the open source SumatraPDF viewer with your program and use it to display the pdf's.
http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/index.html
One nice thing about SumatraPDF, other than it being open source, is that it doesn't require an install. It consists solely of a single .exe, so you could just stick the .exe in your app's folder and call it to display pdf's. SumatraPDF is a pretty bare-bones viewer, so it may be one of the ones you've already looked at and rejected as "not fully functional", but I'm not sure whether you're going to find any perfect open source solution.
As others brought up in the similar thread that was linked from this one, you might consider using the Gnostice library or the WPCubed wpdfviewer component. You have to purchase a developer's license for those, but then can incorporate them in your app and deploy as many as you want with no runtime licensing fees.
My answer to this question discusses the Adobe API.
I missed the PS. Some other answers to the same question may help.
I've got simple java-based ppt->swf sub-project that basically works. The open source software out there, OpenOffice.org and JODConverter do the job great.
The thing is, to do this I need to install OO.o and run it in server mode. And to do that I have to install OO.o, which is allot of software (~160MB) just to convert the source PPT files to an intermediate format. Also, the public OO.o distributions are platform specific and I'd really like a single, cross platform set of files. And, I'd like to not interfer with a system's current settings, like file extension associations.
As things are now, my project is not particularly 'software distribution friendly'.
So, the questions are:
Is it possible to create a custom distribution of OpenOffice? How would one about this?
How lightweight and unobtrusive can I make the installation?
Would it be possible to have a truly cross platform distribution since there would be no OO.o UI?
Are there any licensing issues I need to be aware of? (On my list of things to check out, but if you them already then TIA!)
I have no idea to accomplish such task, but Microsoft has its PPT viewer that is for free and very small, maybe in .NET (C#) you can use some kinda function to save into a intermediate file that you need...
and by the way, how are you handling slide transictions?
I found a software that does that but you need MS PPT installed.
this was just an idea, now regarding your actually question:
you can create your own installation of OO, just jump to the Installation project and follow the lines.
I did not read 'til the end, but from the 1st paragraph it seams what you are searching for.
No, not unless you are neck deep coding in the OpenOffice project.