FLexTools 1.2.5

[Craig Farrow]

Hi,

FLExTools 1.2.5 is available now at
https://github.com/cdfarrow/FLExTools/wiki

In this update:
+ Updated for compatibility with Python 2.7.11
+ Updated for compatibility with FieldWorks 8.3.0
+ Report.ProgressStart takes optional 'message' parameter
+ Changes in FLExDBAccess:
Added LexiconGetExampleTranslation()
+ Bug fixes to Chinese Modules
+ UI enhancements
+ New Modules:
Export/Dump_Texts_To_File
Export/Dump_All_Headwords_To_File
Export/Dump_Published_Headwords_To_File
Utilities/Approve_Spelling_of_Numbers
Chinese/Generate_Reversal_Sort_Field_Only


== About FLExTools ==

FLExTools is a framework for running Python scripts against a Fieldworks
database. All the UI and script management is provided by FLExTools.
Simply create a Python script (a /Module/) to do the processing work and
then run it from FLExTools. Modules can be grouped into /Collections/ so
that a set of scripts can be run with one button click.

These are some ideas of what you can use FLExTools for:

* Consistency checks
* Report on missing or duplicate data
* Create custom reports or export formats
* Perform custom analysis
* Modify data fields in ways that aren't convenient or possible
within Fieldworks

Craig.

[Kari Valkama]

Hi Craig,

Thanks for the info.
I am interested in the future. Is there a plan to make a Python 3.x compatible version of FlexTools?

Yours,
Kari

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[Craig Farrow]

Hi Kari,

We are dependent on Python support for .NET, and use a project called
Python for .NET. That project doesn't support Python 3. I'm interested
to know why Python 3 support might be important/useful to you.

[https://sourceforge.net/projects/pythonnet/]

Craig.

[Hugh Paterson]

@Craig

Are you saying then that with FLEx Tools, one must also have the .net framework installed for the FLEx tools to work? .NET is not listed as a requirement on your github documentation, which would be relevant to those of us who use *NIX machines and either visualize FLEx or run FLEx on linux. Personally I use python on OS X and not on my windows machine, so I would have tried to use FLExTools on my OS X box after copying over the FLEx Database to my OS X Box. Good to know that FLEx Tools is a Windows only software solution, even though it is written in Python...

Second question: is there any reason that it was written in Python rather than .NET or C#? wouldn't those other languages have been faster on Windows machines and required fewer installed packages?

- Hugh

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[Kari Valkama]

Hi Craig,

Thanks for asking.

As a general principle I am interested on modern code and tools.
Old code, like code written with Windows Forms, has its problems.
Python 3 is the future.

Also, similar to what Hugh mentioned, I am a Mac user.

Yours,
Kari

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[maxwell]

On 2016-08-10 12:08, Hugh Paterson wrote:
> Are you saying then that with FLEx Tools, one must also have the .net
> framework installed for the FLEx tools to work? .NET is not listed as a
> requirement on your github documentation, which would be relevant to
> those
> of us who use *NIX machines and either visualize FLEx or run FLEx on
> linux.

Dunno if you're taking votes, but if you are, I would also prefer to run
FLEx tools on Linux (even though we use FLEx itself on Windows
machines). Linux is where all my other language munging tools live.

Mike Maxwell
University of Maryland

[Kim Blewett (gm)]

You can use FLEx just fine on Linux, and a project can S/R between mixed
Win & Linux machines.

=) Kim Blewett
Language Technology, PNG
(UMN grad in "Individual major-Linguistics" back in the olden days)

[maxwell]

On 8/10/2016 11:48 PM, Kim Blewett (gm) wrote:
> You can use FLEx just fine on Linux, and a project can S/R between mixed
> Win & Linux machines.

I know, but the query is about FLEX Tools, the Python tools for munging
data extracted from FLEx, which is different. The question is whether
FLEx Tools requires .NET, which afaik is Windows-only. (It's been
ported to at least Red Hat Linux, see
http://developers.redhat.com/dotnet/, but there are lots of other nix's.)

> On 08/11/2016 04:56 AM, maxwell wrote:
>> On 2016-08-10 12:08, Hugh Paterson wrote:
>>> Are you saying then that with FLEx Tools, one must also have the .net
>>> framework installed for the FLEx tools to work? .NET is not listed as a
>>> requirement on your github documentation, which would be relevant to
>>> those
>>> of us who use *NIX machines and either visualize FLEx or run FLEx on
>>> linux.
>>
>> Dunno if you're taking votes, but if you are, I would also prefer to
>> run FLEx tools on Linux (even though we use FLEx itself on Windows
>> machines). Linux is where all my other language munging tools live.

--
Mike Maxwell
max...@umiacs.umd.edu
"I cannot believe that our existence in this universe
is a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an
incidental blip in the great cosmic drama. Our
involvement is too intimate. The physical species
Homo may count for nothing, but the existence of
mind in some organism on some planet in the universe
is surely a fact of fundamental significance. Through
conscious beings the universe has generated
self-awareness." --Paul Davies

[Craig Farrow]

Thanks for all the interest. I'll give a bit of history/explanation:

FlexTools was conceived and built before the Linux version of Fieldworks
was available. At that time Fieldworks was strictly a .NET application.
FLExTools actually hooks into the Fieldworks DLLs for all the database
access, so it needed to be a .NET application, too. At the time some
people were using Mono on Linux to run Fieldworks, and it was hoped that
it wouldn't take too much to get FlexTools working under Mono. (I don't
know if anyone ever tried that, and I guess no-one uses Mono for
Fieldworks any more.)

It was natural to use Python for the application itself. Since Python
for .NET was needed for the scripts it didn't actually add any extra
dependencies. As for speed, I don't think a compiled language would give
noticeable advantage since the application primarily manages UI and uses
Fieldworks (C#) DLLs for database access, etc.

I decided to use Windows Forms for the UI since that is what Fieldworks
uses, and again, would (hopefully) work with Mono.

So, FlexTools actually requires a Fieldworks installation on the same
OS. I.e. copying a database to an OS without Fieldworks will not work.

Now that there is a Linux version of Fieldworks the situation has
changed. I don't know what the architecture for that is, and what would
be involved in making a Linux compatible FlexTools. If there is
significant interest (and people to help) then it would be worth looking
into. (So far FlexTools has been my personal part-time project with help
as needed from the Fieldworks team. We are hoping to simplify the
integration somewhat in Fieldworks 9.)

@Kari, how do you use Fieldworks on a Mac? If on a Windows virtual
machine, then FlexTools should work fine.

* Mono: http://www.mono-project.com/docs/about-mono/

Craig.

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[Hugh Paterson]

@Craig, thank you for this more detailed explanation. My assumption was that you were accessing the xml database itself with xml like sorting and queries. If your not directly reaching into the xml then the necessity for the .net framework makes sense. Though I wonder, in future would tools which directly reach into the xml be expressions with more utility and greater portability?

All the best, 

Hugh Paterson

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[maxwell]

On 2016-08-12 13:43, Hugh Paterson wrote:
> @Craig, thank you for this more detailed explanation. My assumption was
> that you were accessing the xml database itself with xml like sorting
> and
> queries. If your not directly reaching into the xml then the necessity
> for
> the .net framework makes sense. Though I wonder, in future would tools
> which directly reach into the xml be expressions with more utility and
> greater portability?

Agreed--that was my initial assumption too, and when I saw I was wrong
about that, it occurred to me that extracting the information from the
XML might be at least as easy (although it would require re-doing the
back end of the tools). There are many Python libraries for analyzing
XML, both SAX-type approaches that parse and process as you read the XML
stream, and approaches that parse the entire file into memory, then
process it. I've used both; the SAX approach is useful for streaming
data (obviously not the case here), but also for XML files that are too
large to conveniently hold in memory (like large dictionaries).

I think the one potential difficulty with getting the data from the XML
is that there is no published (or maybe even unpublished) schema for the
XML. That not only makes it a reverse engineering task, but it also
means that undocumented changes to the database could cause problems for
developers of the tools

At least there wasn't a schema the last time I looked, which was awhile
back. Maybe there is now?

Mike Maxwell

[Paul Nelson]

Perhaps the LSDev team can document the schema and publish it for people to use.

Would this be helpful?

Paul Nelson

---

From: maxwell
Sent: ‎8/‎12/‎2016 5:39 PM
To: flex...@googlegroups.com
Cc: Hugh Paterson
Subject: Re: [FLEx] FLexTools 1.2.5

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[maxwell]

On 2016-08-12 19:05, Paul Nelson wrote:
> Perhaps the LSDev team can document the schema and publish it for
> people to use.
>
> Would this be helpful?

It would be helpful to me: I'm interested in porting between the
FLEx-internal representations of morphology, phonology and lexicography,
and our UMD representations. One application would be to convert FLEx
grammars and lexicons into a format that a Finite State Transducer could
use, giving a third morphological parsing engine.

There have also been rumblings in an LSA committee that I'm on about
needing a standard for glossed interlinear text. There was a dearth of
documented XML ways of handling that, and it might help to know what
FLEx does.

If FlexTools were to access data from FLEx via the XML store, instead of
the current .NET method, there would need to be documentation of that
XML format (the original topic of this thread)

There was just recently a discussion on this mailing list about
importing ELAN data into FLEx; I guess that particular import question
is handled, but other programs may need import/export. In fact,
interoperability between tools via import/export is the general use-case
that unifies the above examples. (Or ideally those tools would just
adapt FLEx's representation, but that's as likely as...well, maybe FLEx
adapting the other program's data representation.)

Finally, I would think it helpful to the FLEx team themselves to
document this. But surely they already have some internal documentation
that just hasn't been made public?

Creating a schema and documenting it are, I suppose, two different
things. XML can be written to be as self-documenting as any other
programming language, but there's a lot more that could be done besides
choosing nice tag names. But a first step, IMO, would be to just
publish the schema without any further documentation.

[Craig Farrow]

FlexTools was originally written for Fieldworks 6, which was before the
switch to XML storage. Going through Flex code for the database access
meant minimal changes to FlexTools to handle the database format change.
Also, the Flex code handles certain data integrity constraints, etc.
Working directly with the xml creates a much larger task in keeping in
sync with model changes, etc. I think integrating the FlexTools
functionality *into* Fieldworks would be the better path.

Craig.

> <mailto:craig_...@sil.org <mailto:craig_...@sil.org>>>

> wrote:
>
> Hi Kari,
>
> We are dependent on Python support for .NET, and use a project
> called Python for .NET. That project doesn't support
> Python 3. I'm
> interested to know why Python 3 support might be
> important/useful
> to you.
>
> [https://sourceforge.net/projects/pythonnet/
> <https://sourceforge.net/projects/pythonnet/>
> <https://sourceforge.net/projects/pythonnet/
> <https://sourceforge.net/projects/pythonnet/>>]
>
> Craig.
>
>
> On 8/08/2016 1:44 p.m., Kari Valkama wrote:
>
> Hi Craig,
>
> Thanks for the info.
> I am interested in the future. Is there a plan to make a
> Python 3.x compatible version of FlexTools?
>
> Yours,
> Kari
>
> Craig Farrow <craig_...@sil.org
> <mailto:craig_...@sil.org>

> <mailto:craig_...@sil.org

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[Randy Regnier]

On 8/12/2016 7:07 PM, Craig Farrow wrote:

> FlexTools was originally written for Fieldworks 6, which was before
> the switch to XML storage. Going through Flex code for the database
> access meant minimal changes to FlexTools to handle the database
> format change. Also, the Flex code handles certain data integrity
> constraints, etc. Working directly with the xml creates a much larger
> task in keeping in sync with model changes, etc. I think integrating
> the FlexTools functionality *into* Fieldworks would be the better path.

There is no guarantee that Flex 7 & 8 users are using the xml storage
system at all, since the other supported option is an object database.

Most of the Flex 7, 8, & 9 code has no idea how the data is stored, or
even *if* it is stored. Flex 7 was set up that way to make it easier to
change persistence systems on fairly short notice, if a better one came
along. (I tested 6-8 different cross-platform persistence systems,
before LSDev committed to switch to what became Flex 7.)

As such, it is a bad overall architectural design for programs to make
any assumptions about how Flex data is stored. Doing so would bind that
program to both the storage structure *and* to the Flex model. (The
FlexTools approach is only tied to the actual model.) I don't think Flex
believes its storage xml is any kind of a formal standard that anyone
can use. Flex can import and export select data in those kinds of
standards, of course, but its own system is not such a standard at the
moment.

In the early days, it was simply not possible to create a DTD for the
Flex data model, given how it defined its model and the rules of DTDs.
(Object and/or property names were 'overloaded', which means they had
different meanings in different contexts.) Whether a clever person could
create a Schema today out of the model is an interesting question, but I
suspect it would be quite ugly for a human to try and read it, when it
came time to make changes in an external program.

I guess Flex has never had a felt need to validate its persisted data,
since it handles that consistency business in its own code, before it is
persisted. Flex 7 has tests that ensure that the data that is serialized
and then de-serialized are the same, but it isn't an xml schema validator.

Randy Regnier

[KevinC99]

Hi Craig,

It looks like Python for .NET supports Python 3 as of version 2.1.0: https://github.com/pythonnet/pythonnet/releases/tag/v2.1.0 .

Also, they moved to GitHub: https://github.com/pythonnet/pythonnet

Kevin