WiX: Calling Heat.exe from post build events in Visual Studio 2010 Projects

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Good Night World!

This is my first post in English, please be patient…

I just want to share the way that I have used to generate wxs fragments for a WiX Setup Project using Heat tool and getting compatibility with Microsoft Team Foundation 2010 Build Service Host .

The idea is that each VB or C# dll library or executable project have to generate wxs fragments in it’s own post build event.

You may use this command to generate wxs fragment to install a dll into the GAC:

"$(WIX)bin\heat.exe"
file "$(TargetPath)"
-cg $(TargetFileName)
-gg
-var var.$(ProjectName).TargetDir
-srd
-dr INSTALLLOCATION
-t $(SolutionDir)HeatGAC.xslt
-out "$(SolutionDir)WiXSetup\Fragments\$(TargetFileName).wxs"

Or if you need to register a TypeLibrary you have to use:

"$(WIX)bin\heat.exe"
file "$(TargetDir)$(TargetName).tlb"
-cg $(TargetName).tlb
-gg
-var var.$(ProjectName).TargetDir
-srd
-dr INSTALLLOCATION
-out "$(SolutionDir)WiXSetup\Fragments\$(TargetName).tlb.wxs"

Ask me if you need more help to understand the command syntax.

Hoping to be useful,

Good Night!

Remote Open SQL

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Greetings all,

From several months I’m dedicating my spare time to a new software product. It’s called Remote Open SQL and is aimed at those who need to extract a large amount of data from SAP R / 3.

As you may have guessed the topic is technical and advanced so if there is among you who would like to hear the latest news on my travels I invite him to come back later …

I leave you only a brief reference to the ideas behind the project.

I often want to see the data from SAP tables into Excel or Access for later use. For this purpose there are various transactions in SAP, SE11, SE16, SE16N, or you can create programs that connect to SAP via RFC function modules and invoke the RFC_READ_TABLE (transaction SE37 to see it).

All these methods have limitations, mainly for speed, flexibility and scalability.

My project aims to overcome all these limitations and to achieve the goal I had to bring all that I learned during my, albeit short, career.

Originally I wanted to create a software similar to Everything that worked with the files stored in SAP (eg those in KPro) but then I was confronted with problems that gradually led me to focus on the first necessary step: the rapid extraction of data.

Recently I decided to publish my project under the GPLv2 license, and then publish it all on CodePlex soon.

As soon as possible to update this article with all the references.

SQL Remote Open allows the user to write a Open SQL query and run it connecting to SAP via RFC.

The biggest challenges I faced were:

  1. Understanding the limits of ABAP language using Open SQL and RFC function modules.
  2. Achieving scalability in terms of size of the extracted tables (millions of records).
  3. Obtaining high performance extraction in absolute terms (tens of millions of records per hour).
  4. Checking authorizations for users accessing tables selected by queries.
  5. Avoiding SQL injection.
  6. Creating a simple GUI for the query execution. This part is still evolving.
  7. Minimize the steps for installation.

What’s missing? Very much! Mine is just the first step to test market interest. I decided to make the project open source as possible to facilitate its diffusion and to personally experience the difficulties that must be overcome before it can be a reliable product. Also I’m interested in touching all the steps in the chain: from concept, to prototype development (current situation), publish, promote, support, and who knows … maybe even to receive donations :D

If you are interested in the topic stay in touch! Just a few days left to the first publication of the SQL Remote Open!

Update!

The project is on line! Follow the link: http://remoteopensql.codeplex.com/