Working with an XML database - Windows Phone 7 Software Development

Nevermind, I found the help I needed here. I may need help later on, but for now I can continue myself.
--------------
Hey there, thanks for reading.
I'm working on my first Windows Phone application, but I'm having some trouble right now. It's an application to keep track of donations to a small children's daycare. The idea is to keep track of what has anything that has recently been donated, and what people said that they might have (for example over the phone) so they can keep track of what to expect, what to look for and what to replace in the near future.
As I'm pretty new to Silverlight and C# (I do have plenty xHTML / CSS / PHP experience) I find it hard to parse and write to the XML file correctly. I've searched on MSDN and browsed trough a few pages of Google search results, but to no avail. I did find some examples, for example using XDocument, but then MSDN said it wasn't available for SL on Windows Phone.
Basically, I need a method that, depending on the input ...
# reads all items from the XML (to show a list on the app's main page)
# reads 1 specific item (for a detail view)
or
# reads either all received, or all expected donations
Also, I'm not quite sure what would be the best way to save the DateTime value to the XML. I assumed the best way would be splitting it up in day/month/year etc, but if there's a better solution I'll gladly take your advice.
If any of you could show me an example, or give me a push in the right direction, I would really appreciate it!
My current XML layout is below:
Code:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<donations>
<received>
<!-- begin sample data-->
<donation id="0">
<dateTime>
<day>18</day>
<month>2</month>
<year>2011</year>
<hours>5</hours>
<minutes>13</minutes>
</dateTime>
<contact>Henk</contact>
<items>Football, 2 tennis rackets</items>
<money>150.00</money>
<description>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Donec ac justo dui, id aliquam erat. Aliquam quis lorem et nulla.</description>
</donation>
<!-- end sample data-->
</received>
<expected>
</expected>
</donations>

Related

[Q] [Resolved] [.Net CF 3.5] How do i create a treeview based file browser

I have a problem with a project i'm working on and that is:
How do i create a TreeView based file browser that can export a selected path and filename to a textbox and a Process.Start call at the same time. That's it in a nut shell. The main part if the tree view bit but i haven't figured out how to do variables yet and i'm gonna need one for the second part. I have spent hours googling and i have this question posted on a dedicated VB forum.
I'm using Visual Basic 2008 as the IDE and .Net CF 3.5 as the language (obviously)
If anyone has any ideas on this i'll gladly hear them coz i am really stuck. I found writting code to soft reset a device was easier
TreeNodeCollection tr=treeView1.Nodes;
TreeNode tn;
foreach (string dirs in System.IO.Directory.GetDirectories(System.IO.Directory.GetDirectoryRoot(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetModules()[0].FullyQualifiedName)))
{
tn = new TreeNode(dirs);
//tr = new TreeNodeCollection();
tr.Add(tn);
}
ergintiravoglu said:
TreeNodeCollection tr=treeView1.Nodes;
TreeNode tn;
foreach (string dirs in System.IO.Directory.GetDirectories(System.IO.Directory.GetDirectoryRoot(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetModules()[0].FullyQualifiedName)))
{
tn = new TreeNode(dirs);
//tr = new TreeNodeCollection();
tr.Add(tn);
}
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Is that C# code or VB?
M3PH said:
Is that C# code or VB?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
C#....VB don't have the curly brackets
So i've come back to this question after a few months avoiding VB. I'm now working on a new product and the lack of an folderbrowserdialog object in .Net CF is killing me.
What i need is this (oh and thanks to everyone that posted above but i can't make that solution work). A way to list all the folders on a device and then select one that can be passed to a variable so it's path can be used elsewhere. Maybe also pass the path to a textbox just so it's clear what you have selected. I've spent 2 days googling this and i did find a few things. Most don't work and the rest are in c# which is not much good. So if anyone wants to help me out i would really appreciate it.
Get your head round this.........
O.K. Here's how it's done, with a crash course in one of the most powerful of programming techniques - Recursion. It can confuse the hell out of rookie programmers, as they just can't get their heads round what's going on. It is dependant on a function's local variables and fortunately, .NET's stack based architecture allows us to use it to the full.
You will need, 1.) a TreeView object - named "treeView1" and 2.), a label named "label1" placed underneath it. The label is only there to prove the point that we can get at the full pathname of the selected directory in the Treeview. In reality it can be dropped, just put your processing code directly in the TreeView's AfterSelect() event.
The Form_Load() event gets the directories in the root directory, by calling GetDirList with an initial directory of "\".
GetDirList() adds the directories to the TreeView then calls GetDirList again on each directory to get any subdirectories, and again on each subdirectory, ad nauseum. Keep going until there are no more directories returned.
When completed TreeView contains a list of every directory/subdirectory on the device.
When you select an item from the TreeView the full pathname is displayed in the label. The image at the bottom shows it running under debug on the WinMo 5.0 emulator. There are several directories you would not normally see on your device.
Good Luck, stephj.
Code:
Private Sub Form1_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As EventArgs)
Me.GetDirList("\")
End Sub
Private Sub GetDirList(ByVal PathName As String)
Dim dirs As String
For Each dirs In Directory.GetDirectories(PathName)
Dim tn As New TreeNode(dirs)
Me.treeView1.Nodes.Add(tn)
Me.GetDirList(tn.FullPath)
Next
End Sub
Private Sub treeView1_AfterSelect(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As TreeViewEventArgs)
Me.label1.Text = e.Node.FullPath
End Sub
P.S.
You will need the VB equivalent of using System.IO adding to your project.
This stuff has been around since .NET CF 1.1
The original project was written in C#, I used .NET Reflector to translate it into VB from the original. The original C# is included here:-
Code:
using System;
using System.Text;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using System.IO;
namespace Test
{
public partial class Form1 : Form
{
public Form1()
{
InitializeComponent();
}
private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
GetDirList("\\");
}
private void GetDirList(string PathName)
{
foreach (string dirs in System.IO.Directory.GetDirectories(PathName))
{
TreeNode tn = new TreeNode(dirs);
treeView1.Nodes.Add(tn);
GetDirList(tn.FullPath);
}
}
private void treeView1_AfterSelect(object sender, TreeViewEventArgs e)
{
label1.Text = e.Node.FullPath;
}
}
}
cool thanks. I'll have a look at coding this tomorrow (i having some fun time right now).
I did have a look at doing this with a list box yesterday but i was getting errors left, right and centre so i really do appreciate the help.
Just an FYI the VB equivelent of "using" is "imports" otherwise most of the objects are the same but i don't nee to worry about adding it as the program is already interacting with the file system.
Again thanks very much. I really appreciate you taking the time to help me out.
I've just had a look at implementing this but i'm having trouble getting the treeview to populate with the folder list. What am i doing wrong? the object names all match up and i can't see why it's not working. Am i just being plain dense?
What i have Is pretty much what you posted except for a few changes to allow for the fact that the treeview object is in a tabcontrol and i already have a bunch of labels knocking around so the label is called label28 and not label1.
I'm sorry if it appears like i'm not trying or i'm asking you to do all the work but i am genuinely really stuck. I get the recursion principal, That's not an issue but i'm trying to create something from scratch that should really have been included in .net CF and i'm just not that good a programmer yet
Should work..... but without seeing the actual code it's rather hard to remotely debug it.
To prove the point, here's the complete VS2008 VB .NET CF 3.5 project.
In the \bin\release directory is the actual executable. If you have .NET CF 3.5 on your device, drop DirList.exe onto it and run it.
I had a look at the project you posted and just copied the coded over. I did make some tweaks so it only loaded the folder list when the tab the treeview was on was clicked but that didn't work so i repated the code in as is and voila! it works. Now all i need is to create a variable to store the selected path in but i think i can manage that.
Again a huge thanks.
Hierarchical view......
Here's the project to indent, compress, and expand the directory tree structure.
I was just playing around with this and i noticed that when you click on a directory below "\" the path becomes "\\this\path". This is obviously not a valid windows mobile path and it is causing an IOexception and I have no idea how to fix it. Google suggests lots of c# pages that say to use a regular expression to strip out the illegal characters but the example i found was for the entire path and it seemed to check each character against a variable of illegal values. I'm sure if that would work for me. Heres the link.
Let me know what you think.
I have no idea where the \\this is coming from, I can't replicate it.
To filter out the extra leading slash use this:-
Code:
Private Sub TreeView1_AfterSelect(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.Windows.Forms.TreeViewEventArgs) Handles TreeView1.AfterSelect
If TreeView1.SelectedNode.FullPath.Length() = 1 Then
Label1.Text = TreeView1.SelectedNode.FullPath
Else
Label1.Text = TreeView1.SelectedNode.FullPath.Substring(1)
End If
Interesting new problem has cropped up with this code. It doesn't seem to work on rhodiums. It works fine in the emulator, my HD2 and all of CajunFlavouredBob's devices but i have a user that has a rhodium that get the error posted here. I can't replicte it and i don't have a rhodium to test it with. Any ideas?
Hmmmmm another tricky one. Without seeing the device actually throw the error, it can be a bit difficult.
Does this machine actually report the storage card as "\Storage Card"? Some machines don't. In which case you may have to use some storage card enumeration trick to get hold of the real name it uses. This may not apply in this case.
Also, to make things trickier still, the stack dump shows 'GetInternalDirectoryNames()' as the function throwing the error first. This is a level below your call of GetDirectories(), and is being used by the OS to actually go get the info. You may have to create a test version of EXCT2 full of Try...Catch programming blocks, to try to get to the real point where the error is being thrown.
well this turned out to be a memory related issue. So instead of using the folder browser we now use the stock winmo savedialog. because it uses less memory and allows us access to the locations we need.
Thanks for helping though steph.

Start programming: help for coding a vocabulary builder

Hi at all,
I would like to start coding for wp7. I already have the sdk and some knowledge about c#. However, I don't know how and where to start.
My plan is to program a vocabulary builder, that just asks a vocabulary from a database, then waits until the user has thought about the answer, then on click shows the answer and the user can say if it was right or wrong. Dependent on the answer the vocabulary's phase increases or decreases 1. There should be six phases.
No idea how to do that. I even don't know where to save the vocabularies and how to get them on the phone.
Any ideas for me?
Hi,
Depending on the size of the dictionary you could put the vocabs in one or more XML files, that will be deployed with your application. Maybe something like this:
Code:
<dictionary sourcelanguage="spanish" targetlanguage="english">
<vocab id="1" word="uno" translation="one"/>
<vocab id="2" word="dos" translation="two"/>
</dictionary>
Add the file to your project with build type content and read it e.g. with XDocument.Load("spanish.xml") => see here.
Build classes representing your XML-Structure and get a random vocabulary to display it to the user (use a public property e.g. "CurrentWord" in your ViewModel that is bound to a UI-Element in your View).
The "Show answer" button should be binded to a Command that triggers the hidden answer and the "Rate my answer" button to be shown.
To save the phases you could build up a index file that saves the IDs of the vocabularies with an integer of the phase count. This would then be saved each time the user processes words.
Hope this helps a bit.

Webbrowsercontroll

Hello anybody
Actually I write a app to show a social website with the windows phone 7, and to control your status and more.
Now I have a problem. The mobilepage are not very good programmed (not from me ^^).
Also I need a function to set a default zoom level, and a way to disable the zoom for the users.
can you help me please ?
grezz from germany
bibox
One way to do it (and I've a feeling the only way) is to use the following sort of meta tag within the <head>... </head> section of the HTML that you are displaying in the webbrowsercontrol:
<meta name="Viewport" content="width=320; user-scaleable=no; initial-scale=1.0" />
This means of course you need to have control of the HTML that you are trying to display (it won't work unfortunately for displaying someone else's website).
More info here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/iemobile/archive/2010/11/22/the-ie-mobile-viewport-on-windows-phone-7.aspx
Hope that helps,
Ian
He can download external HTML, save it locally, make needful changes and display from the local file Tricky but should work.

problem how to display many data in itemsControl - ListBox?

problem how to display a lot of data to a itemsControl - ListBox?
Hello everyone! I am student developers as on windows phone and I recontre a problem when I want to display in my listbox ItemsControl.
Let me explain the problem:
I said three itemsControl in my listbox;
<ListBox name="MyListBox" >
<ItemsControl name="item_BeforeHead" />
<ItemsControl name="item_Head" />
<ItemsControl name="item_Body" />
</ListBox >
After I get a "Http request" full source code of a web page and I cutting (parse) the contents into three parts: <Before head> <head> <body> to place them in the good items!
The problem is the big website containing more than 50,000 - 1000'000 characters. So more than 30,000 characters in each itemControls. And the problem is the display that's slowing my listbox! The movement is made by jerks ..
Y is there a better way to charge a lot of content and display it after?
Thank you very much in advance for your help, this was a moment I'm looking for this solution ...
And again sorry for my bad english;-)
Change your app design. The whole idea to display items 30,000 characters long is completely wrong (doesn't really matter how fast you are displaying that junk), your list/whatever become simple unreadable.
So, try to formulate your task requirements in correct way first, and look for correct solution after (4 example, if you are trying to display ebooks, there are a few possible solution etc.)
mhhh thank you ! But i found this :
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6170640/lazy-loading-of-listbox-images-from-isolated-storage
And also this class : "LongListSelector" for windows phone 7
kingmiddle said:
mhhh thank you ! But i found this :
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6170640/lazy-loading-of-listbox-images-from-isolated-storage
And also this class : "LongListSelector" for windows phone 7
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I highly doubt this will be beneficial to you as I believe this is also build on the standard listbox. If you really need to store that many items, think about implementing a database, and than let the listbox directly read the data out from the database and filter the amount of results down if needed.
But like sensboston said, don't know what u are trying to do, but who is gonna read 30.000 characters? Think about parsing the content first before you add it to the listbox, so get rid of all the unwanted stuff. By building a regex which will match all the stuff you need than add each match to the listbox/database.

Include local JavaScript within PhoneGap on Windows Phone 7

I have a PhoneGap application designed to work on multiple mobile platforms. I'm loading a dynamic HTML content from an external page on the Internet using jQuery Mobile. The problematic system is Windows Phone 7.
This is what I get from the external page, with the URL of the script tag already replaced to load from the phone instead of from the net to save bandwidth:
HTML:
<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8" src="x-wmapp1:/app/www/test.js"></script>
This works fine on Android, iPhone and even BlackBerry when I replaced the x-wmapp1: part by a respective counterpart (e.g. file:///android_asset/www/ on Android). However, on Windows Phone 7 it doesn't seem to work at all.
When I try to load the same URL via $.getScript function, it always returns a 404 eror, even if I try and load it with a relative path only.
Any suggestions?
First of all, this type of question may be better suited to the Software Development or Apps and Games sub-forums, as a lot of the people who hang out here are more familiar with homebrew hacks. I'll give it a shot, though.
First of all, what kind of path are you trying to use? I haven't tried loading scripts or images in HTML or JS, but to dynamically load content within the app itself typically requires some care with regard to the path. For example, is the JS file being built into the assembly (as a resource) or included alongside it (as content)? How about the HTML page?
This is a kind of lame approach, but one option that's sure to work is just inlining the scripts in the page, directly. That won't increase the total app size or load time at all, although it might make maintaining the app take a little bit more effort.
Thanks for the reply, I will try to post this into the more appropriate forum.
With regards to paths - you can see the path in the HTML snippet I provided in the original question. It's all a bit specific and we cannot afford to load JS directly from page, since that does increase the size of the resulting HTML, sent from an external PHP page, thus increasing bandwidth. This is the first reason why we chose to have all JS and CSS files directly bundled with the application and load them internally rather than from Internet.
Also, all of JS files are included alongside the application as content. I'm using the same approach for all images, since if they were included as a resource, they would not show in the application.
GoodDayToDie said:
First of all, this type of question may be better suited to the Software Development or Apps and Games sub-forums, as a lot of the people who hang out here are more familiar with homebrew hacks. I'll give it a shot, though.
First of all, what kind of path are you trying to use? I haven't tried loading scripts or images in HTML or JS, but to dynamically load content within the app itself typically requires some care with regard to the path. For example, is the JS file being built into the assembly (as a resource) or included alongside it (as content)? How about the HTML page?
This is a kind of lame approach, but one option that's sure to work is just inlining the scripts in the page, directly. That won't increase the total app size or load time at all, although it might make maintaining the app take a little bit more effort.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
First question: have you set the IsScriptEnabled proerty on the control to True? It defaults to False, preventing scripting within the control. Also, changing it only takes effect
on navigation, so if you already loaded the page and then set this property, it still won't work.
Anyhow, I missed that your HTML was coming externally, and only the scripts and stylesheets were local. That's... interesting, and seems reasonable enough, and I can't find any info online that exactly matches your use case. The way you're structuring the script src URI looks weird to me, but I haven't messed with the WebBrowserControl very much at all.
One solution, though a bit hacky:
Use the WebBrowserControl's InvokeScript function to dynamically load scripts into your pages. To do this, you would first need to load the script file content into a .NET String object. The GetResourceStream function is probably your best friend here, combined with ReadToEnd(). Then, just invoke the eval() JS function, which should be built-in, and pass it the JS file content. That will load the JS into the web page, creating objects (including functions) and executing instructions as the files are eval()ed.
Of course, you'd need to do this on every page navigation, but you can actually automate it such that the page itself requests that the app load those scripts. In your app, bind the script-loading function to the ScriptNotify event handler, probably with some parameter such as the name of the script to load. Then, on each page served from your server to the app, instead of including standard <script src=...> tags, use <script>window.external.notify('load localscript1.js')</script> and so on; this will trigger the app's ScriptNotify function for you.
I hope that helps. I can see your use case, but somewhat surprisingly, I couldn't find anybody else online who had either run into your problem or written a tutorial on doing it your way.
Thank you for your reply, it was very informative. One question though - why do you think the way I'm structuring the SCRIPT URI is wierd? I tried to mess around with relative URIs and the such, however those would load the JavaScript file from Internet rather than from the application itself.
The problem I'm running into with your proposed solutions, however is that:
1. the project is a PhoneGap/Cordova application, using its own components, so I have no idea where I would look for IsScriptEnabled here (although this all worked on an older PhoneGap release, so I'm guessing they have it set up correctly)
2. injecting a script programmatically on each navigation would require me to rewrite much of the code we already use for other platforms, not to mention those custom Cordova components, which I don't even know if they can handle such thing
As for my user case - I was surprised to be the only guy on the internet with this methodology in place as well. So it either works for everyone else or nobody really thought of doing it my way, since it's basically an Internet application (maybe the don't want to disclose their sources, who knows).
CyberGhost636 said:
1. the project is a PhoneGap/Cordova application, using its own components, so I have no idea where I would look for IsScriptEnabled here (although this all worked on an older PhoneGap release, so I'm guessing they have it set up correctly)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
In the WebBrowser properties.
CyberGhost636 said:
As for my user case - I was surprised to be the only guy on the internet with this methodology in place as well.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Of course you not "the only guy". I've tried to port/run a few HTML java-script based games on WP7 (Digger and couple more) more then year ago; they runs well with one HUGE exception - touch screen events are freezing scripts execution and make games not playable.
The "x-wmapp1:" URI scheme was what I was referring to. Not sure where that comes from, but I haven't done anything really with the WebBrowser control.
I have no knowledge of PhoneGap or Cordova; I assume they're "we write your app for you" frameworks? One would assume that such tools would know to set IsScriptEnabled, but you may have to do so manually. A bit of web searching on that direction may be fruitful - maybe earlier versions enabled scripting by default, and now it's disabled by default so you have to specify an option somewhere?
Injecting the script on navigation really doesn't require any major change to the server-side code. I mean, is sending
<script>window.external.notify('load localscript1.js')</script>
really much different from sending
<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8" src="x-wmapp1:/app/www/test.js"></script>
? If that's too different, you could instead send
<script src="http://yourserver.com/LoadLocalScripts.js"></script>
and put "LoadLocalScripts.js" on your server with the following code:
window.external.notify('load localscript1.js');
This has only a trivial increase in server traffic and load time, but lets you continue using external scripts instead of inline ones. Very little server-side change needed at all.
Now, the additional client-side code to support the window.external.notify and call InvokeScript... normally I'd say that's dead easy, because it is if you have any experience with the .NET framework, but in your case I get the feeling that this isn't so? I code to the framework, or to the underlying native code, and I tend to code "raw" (very little auto-generated code), so I'm not going to be able to help you solve the problems with a "make me an app" wizard unless I can see the code it generates for you.
For what it's worth, here's the approximate raw code that I'd use (it's over-simplified, but close enough):
void HandleNotify (String param) {
String[] parts = param.split(" ");
if (parts[0] == "load") LoadScript(parts[1]);
}
void LoadScript (String script) {
String content = Application.GetResourceStream(new Uri(script, UriType.Absolute)).ReadToEnd();
theBrowserControl.InvokeScript("eval", content);
}
void theBrowserControl_Loaded (...event handler args here...) {
theBrowserControl.IsScriptEnabled = true;
theBrowserControl.ScriptNotify += HandleNotify;
theBrowserControl.Navigate("http://yoursite.com");
}
the URI comes from Windows Phone itself, with this code, you can see for yourself:
var a = document.createElement('a');
a.setAttribute('href', '.');
alert(a.href);
also, I've been informed that this works in Cordova 2.0, so it might be a 1.8.1 bug... will try and see how it goes
thanks for your help so far!
Looks like it was a problem with PhoneGap 1.8.1 - after upgading to Cordova 2.0 (PhoneGap got renamed) it all works now... thanks for all the help!

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