Eric, I've updated the coapp toolkit PropertySheet code to support parsing the format for Autopackage (sample: http://j.mp/mkoWkn ) and actually another use I have in building a tool to simplify shallowforking (called pTk... sample http://j.mp/lz5aha ).
The format is pretty damn nice--my earlier parser only needed a couple tweaks to get everything you and I needed. It's also pretty simple to use--sample : http://j.mp/mvS9M6 (You can even persist out the property sheet back to disk with .Save() :D) Generally the property sheet is a collection of rules, each rule can have a Selector, Class, Id and Parameter (defined along the lines of css) You can just do rule queries using linq (ie... from rule in propertySheet where rule.Selector == "pkg" select rule ) or you can use the indexer[] on the propertysheet. Each rule can have a number of properties. A property has a name (which can contain letters, numbers, dashes) and a Value (which really can be compound (lvalue = rvalue), expression (surrounded in parenthesis ), a collection of strings or simply a string value) -- check out the Rule class, it's pretty simple. As I mentioned, the syntax for the file is largely compatible with css, with a few notable exceptions: - block comments /* */ as well as double slashes // are supported for comments - string values can be quoted, (as both halves of a compound value)... example: http://j.mp/j1DWme ... Happy, sad, and silly are all pretty much the same - supports c# style @"strings" (noted by 'fudge' in the sample) - it's pretty damn backslash friendly. - expressions are values that are surrounded in parenthesis () ... ie ({$CURRENT}-1) .. you'll get the contents (sans whitespace) but it doesn't provide any magic to evaluate that for you. I'm sure we can whip something up with dynamic code if you need to.. G -----Original Message----- From: coapp-developers-bounces+garretts=microsoft....@lists.launchpad.net [mailto:coapp-developers-bounces+garretts=microsoft....@lists.launchpad.net] On Behalf Of Garrett Serack Sent: Wednesday, April 27, 2011 1:14 PM To: Philip Allison Cc: coapp-developers Subject: Re: [Coapp-developers] Input for Autopackage We've actually got a parser in CoApp already that handles this format for another purpose (which is kinda why we went this way), so in the immediate future we'll rely on that. I have another case I may be using this too, so it's nice that we have some overlap. G ________________________________________ From: Philip Allison [mangobr...@googlemail.com] Sent: Wednesday, April 27, 2011 11:34 AM To: Garrett Serack Cc: Eric Schultz; coapp-developers Subject: Re: [Coapp-developers] Input for Autopackage IMHO the quality of parsing & validation is just as important as the file format itself. I'd be happy to put up with most things in terms of file format, on the proviso that if I get it wrong, autopackage does a reasonable job of telling me what's wrong and where in the file it is. FWIW I quite like the example syntax - it reminds me of what libconfuse accepts. In fact, it might be worth seeing if you could just use libconfuse itself; I can't remember if it comes with VS build files, but I've definitely used it on Windows before, and it's small, self-contained & liberally licensed. _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~coapp-developers Post to : coapp-developers@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~coapp-developers More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~coapp-developers Post to : coapp-developers@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~coapp-developers More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
