Automation

Applies to:
  • Microsoft Windows 7 Professional
  • Ms-DOS Command Prompt (6.1.7601)

What?
A quick article on how to rename multiple files using the command prompt and a bit of string manipulation. This example will rename files which contain the string " (Copy)" and replace it with nothing (so removes it). The challenge here is the space character and delimiting by a string.

The Gist
-- What I have
Image00001 (Copy).jpg
Image00002 (Copy).jpg

-- What I want
Image00001.jpg
Image00002.jpg

How?
Before I continue, the undo may work in MS Windows (Control key + Z) but don't count on it. I'm going to use a short batch process but to save time on the different ways of doing this, the example below uses a command prompt to a) create a batch file b) use it to rename the files c) delete the batch file.

What?
A quick note on how to copy files and folders over without overwriting existing files. It's easy to say "Yes" and replace all files. What I need is something that synchronizes files on an internal hard drive to an external one. I wanted it to copy only the files that were new in the original folder and only copy those over (reason being, the archive is 4 terabytes and backing up only the changed files would speed things up).

Applies to:
  • Microsoft Windows XP
  • Microsoft Windows 7
  • Microsoft Windows 8
  • for Vista and Windows 2008 without XCOPY, try ROBOCOPY.

How?
We're going to use MS-DOS because I'm that old.

What?
A quick note for myself as I'd forgotten how to do this (we're talking technology belonging to the 90s - MS-DOS v6.22). The example wants to loop through a directory and then loop through the line it finds.

Why?
I use another technology for automation but sometimes the simpler solution is the one I make for other people to use. Explaining MS-DOS batch programs is a lot easier and colleagues trust these more than my all-in-one GUI applications.

How?
Note: we're using the code in a DOS Batch program so our variables have to be prefixed with a double-percent rather than just the one:

Intro
Prefixing lines with their respective line number in a text file using a Microsoft Windows Operating System... I've just googled this as I couldn't remember how I did this last time and a number of people showing off their MS-DOS batch skills have proposed stupid extensive solutions when all you need is one command-line.


Why?
Working with programming languages, I often need to write the accompanying documentation. Within the documentation, I may want to refer to a line of code within a text file. I also find myself copying amounts of code into the same document and then needing lines prefixed so that I can explain the code.


What?
Change contents of "original_file.txt"
The first line of my code
The second line of my code
The third line of my code
To "results_file.txt"
  1:  The first line of my code
  2:  The second line of my code
  3:  The third line of my code


How?

Applies to:
  • Apimo Webservice 2.0 (apimo.com)
  • PHP v5.5
What?
This is an article on how I connected to the Apimo WebService. The Apimo Webservice is an API provided by apimo.com and requires a server request over HTTPS using the GET method.

Why?
This was quite difficult to connect to and to determine what was wrong with each step of the development as the error messages were somewhat vague. I thought I'd quickly write this article so I don't have to spend so much time on it again.

Note that the below examples, demonstrate a script on a Non-SSL-Enabled host.

How?

Applies to:
  • TravelPort Universal API
  • PHP 4 or 5
  • cURL
What?
An article on how to resolve errors and setup a standard ping request using the TravelPort Universal API. This is to be achieved using PHP as the server-side programming language and cURL, a sub-component of PHP that allows you to send and receive requests as the server (as opposed to the client device).

Why?
Yes there's documentation online that TravelPort provide you with but it didn't help. The error I'm going to address has to do with getting the latest schemas but as I couldn't find anything using Google regarding these errors or how to set up a basic ping request, I thought I'd write this article.

How?
Using PHP and cURL, here is the full script for a standard ping request. Before you say it doesn't work, it has to be updated every time a new schema is introduced to the system. See my errors section for how you can resolve this.

What?
A quick article on how to create a middleware script which accepts the values from a submitted HTML form and sends it to a server on another domain for processing. This applies to Linux Apache MySQL and PHP (LAMP) setups.

Why?
A customer wanted to connect their Mobile App to a third-party API. The third-party only accepts requests from a static and permitted IP address. If the end-user were to make the request, then their own IP address would be the one checked against, and it just wouldn't be manageable to add every new user's IP address to their service. The request has to come from a permitted server with a single IP address.

How?
It's likely that you already know how to submit a HTML form to a server via your Mobile application so the following will only document the process of sending data under the server IP address. We're going to use a PHP script with the cURL function to receive and send the data. cURL is a standard feature on most LAMP setups. If not you can install it from here: http://curl.haxx.se/download.html