FileHelpers 1.6.0 Released

Monday, August 21, 2006

FileHelpers 1.6.0 Released

SourceForge.net - FileHelpers 1.6.0 Released

"The library has 10 months now and a lot of things were added. So I want to thanks you all the people that send your feedback, post motivating entries on the web and a lot of other ones that help me in the development. (partial list of contributors)

Now the important things !!... RunTime Records are here thanks to some help Gerhardt Scriven to use RunTime Compilation. Enjoy it !!

I think in this version like the 2.0 version because the RunTime Records were one of the most requested features and were one of the most hard to implement features, A lot of effort was put in the usability and in a clear API, if you have any suggestion please post it in the forums =)

Other important news are the CsvEngine (for generic Csv files), the FileDiffEngine, the MultiRecordEngine,..

Breaking changes:

- MOD: Now the FixedLengthRecords must contain the exact number of chars. You can pass an extra parameter in the [FixedLengthRecord] attribute to allow a different behavior.
- MOD: CommonActions renamed to CommonSelector in the MasterDetailEngine

Mayor changes:

- ADD: The awaited RunTime Records thanks to the suggestion of Gerhardt Scriven to use RunTime Compilation. Supports for classes written in C# and VB.NET
There are a lot of features inside this new feature, so take a look at the docs
- MOD: The Record Wizard was completely rewritten to use the run time records and now has a lot of options to check the classes the you are building, in the future the wizard can help you to discover the record class based on a sample file
- ADD: Generic Csv files are now supported (for example Excel generated ones)
Was a hard work but worth it because it can be used with any engine.
In the next version I´ll add the Excellent Fast CSV Reader from Sébastien Lorion for standalone CSV processing.
- ADD: Event support !! from this version the FileHelperEngine has 4 events 2 for read operations and 2 for write that are throw before and after process each record.
- ADD: FileDiffEngine to compare files with the same record layout.
- ADD: MultiRecordEngine to read files with different record layouts.
- ADD: DataTableToCsv, CsvToDataTable, RecordsToDataTable, RemoveDuplicateRecords and other methods to the CommonEngine
- ADD: FixedMode Enum for fixed length records, used to provide better validations in Fixed Length Files
- ADD: Template support in ExcelStorage
- ADD: A lot of new examples check it out !!
- MOD: The decimal, double, and single converters now receive an string param to set the decimal delimiter (by default is ".")
- MOD: Improved docs in the SDK, the general help and examples. (Thanks Antoine)

..."

This is maturing very nicely...

If you're interested in seeing a project with some cool C# code, unit testing (NUnit), documentation, etc, check out this project.

One of the first "stupid developer tricks" I play with OSS is to load the source and compile it. If there are no issues, then I give it a +1 bonus to its Priority attribute. If it has good examples, it gets another +1 (examples that don't work get a -1). Doc's, 2+ (user guide's/doc's/etc are the least "exciting" thing, a developer or team that takes the time to do them, and do them well, gets an added bonus. IMHO It's an attention to detail thing...). Included unit tests, +1.
(Can you tell I've been playing RPG's recently? :)

This project (which comes in VS2003/2005 versions) has a +5...