Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2008 - (Page 36)

D02gray_p5ma.qxp 12/7/07 2:26 PM Page 36 Core Technology continued from page 34 BIBPORT: CREATING BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES design ribbon elements. In Figure 3, we have placed the BibPort controls in the “References” ribbon, which contains all of the native Office bibliographic tools. Because BibPort is a C# application hosted within the VSTO framework, it can use the standard mechanisms to present dialogs and other types of elements to users. Although BibPort has no UI elements during much of its execution, user-driven disambiguation is made available through a standard Windows Form. Figure 4 demonstrates this process via a journal article, which is not distinguishable from a magazine article in APA style. BibPort simply presents users with each possible interpretation of the reference, letting them guide the tool. As references are filtered through BibPort, they are programmatically inserted into Word’s Source Manager, which is part of Word 2007’s new reference capabilities. The Source Manager acts as a database for references, letting users easily insert citations. Although BibPort supports this out-of-thebox, you can also use alternative database formats. BibPort can simply ask for an output filename at the beginning of the process and export the references to the file in another program’s native format. However, because the Source Manager is available for manipulation via VSTO, we found it more interesting to target this type of operation. Figure 5 shows the Source Manager after importing a set of references via BibPort. conforming to the WOM. With this set of objects, you can inspect the contents of a document in a detailed way. User Interface Elements BibPort has been ported through three iterations of Visual Studio, beginning with Word 2003 and the first version of VSTO. Although some changes have been made through the first two revisions, the BibPort code base has remained relatively unchanged between Visual Studio 2003 and 2005. The first two versions targeted Word 2003, which used traditional menu-driven systems. Presenting BibPort to users involved inserting a new menu specifically for BibPort functionality. This insertion was accomplished via several lines of code that registered the menu and created the hooks into BibPort at Word startup. With Word 2007, ribbons replaced toolbars, requiring some change in the creation of these UI elements. Visual Studio 2008 includes a Ribbon Designer that assists in the creation of new ribbons and extensions. Figure 6 demonstrates the evolution from creating menus programmatically to creating ribbons through a wizard. This capability brings menu creation to the same level of point-and-click design that is common in Windows Forms in Visual Studio. Figure 3: A ribbon containing BibPort. Implementing BibPort with VSTO Microsoft’s VSTO provides a framework that can host plug-ins written in .NET languages within Office programs. The application and its open documents are represented as objects within a VSTO plug-in. This collection of VSTO objects permits manipulation of the program, as well as navigation of the underlying contents of documents in a structured manner. These objects are available for all supported file types used by Office programs in addition to those supported by aftermarket file conversion filters. VSTO represents an important abstraction that offers a means of processing many documents quickly and easily. To provide access to Word and its documents, VSTO provides a set of objects Nontextual Cues To ascertain nontextual cues, BibPort accesses a sequential container called “Words” located within a Document object, which corresponds to an open document within Word. In Figure 7, the Words container holds each individual parsed word of the document separately, as well as flags indicating whether specific formatting is activated (such as underlining, italics, or boldface). BibPort accesses the attribute flags within Figure 4: Choosing the correct interpretation. Figure 5: Sample BibPort output. Figure 6: Creating design elements in Word 2003 (left) and Word 2007 (right). 36 Dr. Dobb’s Journal l www.ddj.com l May 2007 http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2008

Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2008 Contents Hmmmm Alia Vox Developer Diaries Developer’s Notebook South American Software Development Conversations Inside Visual Studio 2008 BibPort: Creating Bibliographic References Continuous LINQ The ZK Framework Static Testing C++ Code The Agile Edge Effective Concurrency Swaine’s Flames

Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2008

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