Author Topic: tool: excel sheet to compare all elements of two different xml skin files  (Read 34853 times)

jistme

  • Guest
Ok, it's your party ;-)

What columns would you then want to have copied to 'input' tab to have processed?

Only column A from 'custom' tab to 'input' tab column A?
Or both column A from tab 'master' to 'input' tab A, and column A from tab 'custom' to 'input' tab column B?

Or something else?

redwing

  • Guest
Ok, it's your party ;-)

What columns would you then want to have copied to 'input' tab to have processed?

Only column A from 'custom' tab to 'input' tab column A?
Or both column A from tab 'master' to 'input' tab A, and column A from tab 'custom' to 'input' tab column B?

Or something else?

There's already ctrl-M. Just one more to copy custom tab to A column of input tab. (assuming these two will be most frequently used)
For other comparisons, users need to copy and paste manually. What do you think?

jistme

  • Guest
Ok, then maybe:

ctr-m for clearing all and copying 'master A' into 'input A
ctr-p (persönlichen ;-)  for clearing all and copying 'custom A' in 'input A'
ctrl-b (both) for clearing all and copying 'master A' in 'input A' and 'custom A' in 'input B'
ctrl-e (erase) to clear all

 




jistme

  • Guest
Added feature to show possible duplicate element entries in the xml.
Last Edit: September 16, 2013, 02:54:13 PM by jistme

redwing

  • Guest
Thanks for the new feature. But not sure yet about what it does. Performance is not so smooth as the previous version.

BTW I often get the followings.
I get the first one when pasting the content of a xml file to column B of input tab.
Second one is sometimes asked twice after executing ctrl-R. I have to select Yes.



They are just little nuisances, but just to let you know.

jistme

  • Guest
In the past I sometimes had some troubles with skinning when some elements were not responding to any change in rgb values.
It took me quite some time to find out that there sometimes were duplicate entries in the xml, where the second overruled and disabled the first.
This new feature will show such duplicates. (try it out with your Mondrian 1.2 skin ;-)


The 'size and shape' warning when pasting occurs with some xml's.
I believe the cause is the 'base64 'garbage characters, which forces the xml text 'sometimes to be pasted over more then one column.
This is undesirable, but I wouldn't know of an easy fix, and it doesn't effect the end result.
An important consequence however is that you should always paste a new xml to the right of an existing xml column. If you would paste to a column on the left of an existing column, cells on the right xml column could be overwritten.


The "Do you want to replace..." pop-ups should be gone now.


The previous version had a flaw where not all differences would be displayed.
This new one had some changes to fix that, but it slightly complicated the macro, therefor processing might be slightly slower.
Last Edit: September 16, 2013, 08:17:59 PM by jistme

redwing

  • Guest
You're right! I could have never known the skin had duplicates without this.
Thanks for the detailed explanation. Very useful!

jistme

  • Guest
New version with the removal of "Do you want to replace..." pop-ups should be up in about 10 minutes...

redwing

  • Guest
Looks like it's a tab character that pushes some content to the next column and pops up "size and shape" warning.

jistme

  • Guest
You're right.
I'm goooogling for a solution, but can't find it yet.

To remove the problem at the source would be to remove all tabs in the xml itself.

redwing

  • Guest
One solution would be to have users to paste each content of xml to different tabs (input A & input B tab), not to different columns.
Then the macro (ctrl-R) first deletes all tab characters from them before doing its job.

For a macro deleting the character:

http://www.mrexcel.com/archive/VBA/11602.html

<edit> Wait a minute, maybe the second step is not needed if they are copied to different tabs?
Last Edit: September 16, 2013, 09:22:05 PM by redwing

jistme

  • Guest
That could be done, but is complicating things a little more, and doesn't really solve this incompatibility problems between xml and excel.

Therefor I would much prefer to solve the problem at the source, which are the tab delimiters present in some skin xml's, which serve no valid purpose there in the first place? (correct me if I'm wrong)

My preference would be to clean them up before using my tool.

There is a simple to use plugin for notepad++ that easily removes tab delimiters. It's called CLRTabsToSpaces:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/tabstospacesnpp/files/latest/download
(copy dll to C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++\plugins)


Notepad++ itself has a function to do this:
Edit > Blank Operations > TAB to Space

After applying that to the skin xml, the problem seems to be solved, and makes it easily possible to copy back and forth between my tool and notepad++

Before advising this to a wider public maybe you and/or other skinners can also test this some further for reliability?
Last Edit: September 16, 2013, 10:57:05 PM by jistme