Here are a few a my Tcl/Tk programs. I have recently started studying this language. I am currently using the Aqua Tcl/Tk Batteries Included distribution. There might be a few Macintosh features in some of the programs. Enjoy!

Current Contents:

  parseQif is my first Tcl program that does something useful (for me). It takes a qif file exported from Quicken and generates a csv style file that I can use for importing into my Postgresql database. I recommend using the program "DropScript" to wrap parseQif in a Mac Application. This will allow you to simply drop a file on the generated file and automagically have the conversion performed.

  PgBrowse 0.7 is my first Tk program that does something useful. It allows users to browse PostgreSQL databases. The prerequisites are fairly stiff so unless you are a Tk freak with a recent installation of PostgreSQL there might not be a lot of interest...This is a preliminary release, more enhancements to come as I learn Tcl/Tk.

• Version 0.6 released April 16, 2004. Enhancements include an online help system, the ablility to load a sql file into the edit window and the ability to run the program from any location (as long as the directory structure of the application is preserved.
• Version 0.7 released April 17, 2004. The table window now shows null values as "<NULL>" so that the user can distinguish between a null value and an empty string. The user can now save the contents of the last selection as either a CSV style file with "|" as the separator or as a formatted text file.

  PgBrowse 0.8a is basically the same as release 0.7 however I haved bundled L Bayuk's pgin.tcl package in the application. This package provides the functionality of libpq and pgtcl in "pure" tcl. It is a bit slower on large selects...I have also tried to make the application more multiplatform friendly. I no longer specify a font and I have tried to do the right thing with modifier keys. Windows gets "control", unix gets "meta" and Mac gets "command". I would appreciate feed back as to these changes...

• Version 0.8 released April 21,2004 hopefully crossplatform compatible
• Version 0.8a released April 24, 2004. Doh, I forgot to declare tcl_platform as a global. Error did not reveal itself until I tried running on a WinXP platform...

  PgBrowse-0.9 is a rewrite using the "paned window" widget (thus requires Tk 8.4.*). I have also added a menu item "Table Information..." to the file menu. Selecting this menu item will bring up a listbox containing all of the tables/views in the users catalog. The user can then either view the table or examine the data types of each of the columns. I also probe for Pgtcl 1.5 ( a compiled Tcl-Postgresql interface ). If the interface is not found then the fall back is to use pgintcl, a postgresql-tcl interface written in pure tcl. Note that no Postgresql software needs to be present on the computer running PgBrowse.

  PgBrowse-1.0 Nov 8, 2004

This release fixes a bad memory leak and adds many enhancements.

• The ability to use psql (if present). If psql is found, psql meta-commands starting with a "\" in the *first* character position are directly routed to psql for execution. The results are added to the SQL window. In addition if there is a selection in the SQL window, the menu item "Send Selection To Psql" under the File menu will send the selection to psql for execution. The results will be posted in the SQL window. Note: Arbitrary (output only) shell commands can be executed from the SQL window by the sequence "\! shell command"
• The File menu has an item "Display null as NULL". When checked, null fields will be displayed in the grid as NULL otherwise null fields are displayed as empty strings. The check mark toggles with menu item selection.
• The File menu has an item "Send Single Statements". When checked the program will attempt to parse the string being sent to the backend into individual statements and send each statement. If unchecked the entire string is sent to the backend in one shot. Note the parsing algorithm is rather crude. A semicolon is deemed to be a statement seperator if it not preceeded by an odd number of single quotes ( don't use \' use '' ). Checkmark is toggled by selection of the item.
• The File menu has an item "Show Long Fields". When checked the program will attempt to load the entire field into the display grid. This can be problematic when the database contains bytea columns containing a large amount of data (think digital photos). If unchecked and the field length is more than 200 characters then then string "LoNgFiElD:nnn" will be displayed. The nnn will be replaced by the actual length of the field. See below for a method that will, in many cases, allow the user to see the actual contents of the field. The checkmark is toggled by selecting the item.
• There is a contextual menu available for the Selection Results grid. The menu is invoked by a "control-Button-1" click somewhere in the grid. Selecting one of the menu items will control how the contents of the selected field will be displayed ( the selected field is where the mouse is when control-clicked). The field will be displayed in a separate window. This window must be dismissed before another item can be viewed.
  The menu items are:
  
  • View As Text
    The field is assumed to be plain text and the entire contents of the field will be displayed.
  • View As Bytea Text
    The field is assumed to be plain text stored as a bytea object. The entire contents will be "decoded" and displayed.
  • View As Large Object Text
    The field is assumed to be the "oid" of a large object containing text. The contents will be fetched and displayed.
  • View As Bytea Image
    The field is assumed to be an "image" stored in a bytea field. The image will displayed in a new window. Image means anything supported by the Img package.
  • View As Large Object Image
    The field is assumed to be the "oid" of a large object containing an image. The image will be fetched and displayed.

  PgBrowse-1.1 released Oct 21, 2005. It has been a while since I have worked on this program. Enhancements include:

• When the program starts it will look for a directory "~/SQLScripts". If not present the program will attempt to create the directory. Any file in this directory ending in ".sql" will appear in the "Scripts" menu. Selecting an item from this menu will load the SQL code section with the contents of this file. The code can recognize subdirectories of the script directory and ".sql" files in the subdirectory will appear as menu items in the submenu named by the subdirectory. There currently is not a refresh mechanism for the menu other than restarting the program.
• The program remembers recently executed commands. and will step back and forth through the history ( and on the Macintosh). When the program is terminated by invoking the Quit command in the File menu the history is saved as a tcl "set" command in the file "~/SQLScripts/HiStOrY.tcl". As part of the startup process this file is "sourced" to recover the previous command history. Quitting the program by clicking on the close box does *not* save the command history.
• The Help menu has been updated to reflect version 8 of PostgreSQL. Several memory leaks have be repaired and some small program cleanup has been done.

  PgBrowse-1.2 released Oct 23, 2005. Enhancements include:

• The contextual menu has been extended to include items
  • Export Text Field...
    The field is assumed to have a textual representation. The user will be able to specify and store the contents in a file.
  • Export Bytea Field...
    The field is assumed to be a bytea field. The user will be able to specify and store the (decoded) contents in a file.
  • Export Large Object Field...
    The field is assumed to be the "oid" of a large object. The user will be able to specify and store the contents in a file.
• The Script menu now displays a sorted list of menu items.

  PgBrowse-1.3 released Nov 21, 2005. The major improvement is a new table editor.

The source code version of the file can be run on the command line by the commnd "wish PgBrowse.tcl".

For Linux/x86 users I also have a Starpack version pgbrowse.kit. This is a self contained version of the program, it contains it's own Tcl/Tk interpreter and support libraries (I hope). It can be downloaded here. You can start the application either by running the pgbrowse.kit file from the command line or double click the file from a graphical view of where ever the file is stored. Here is a 48x48 png Icon that you can use for an Icon for the application.

Mac OSX users can downloaded a Disk Image of a "Bundled" version of the program here. The bundled version acts like a regular Macintosh application ie it has its own icon and can be started by double clicking the icon. You can set up an environment for Finder opened applications by setting up a plist named environment.plist and storing the result in the directory .MacOSX located in your home directory.

Windows users, sigh, need to simply download the source and install the Active State Tcl/Tk system. If this is done then you can simple double click the PgBrowse.tcl file in its folder. (I have not yet figured out how to wrap a Win XT script...

OK, how does this editor thing work...

• Accessing the editor.
  The editor can be reached by choosing File->Table Info. This will pop up a list box that displays all of the tables and views that the user has access to. Clicking the button labeled "Edit Table" or double clicking the table name will bring up the edit view of the table. This view has a grid of the table and always has a "last" row of fields that contain a single '*' character. Beneath the grid is two rows of navigation tools. If the selected table name is actually a view, then the editing buttons will be disabled.



• Using the Editor.
  
  • Deleting a record
    To DELETE a record, navigate to a view that contains the record and select the record by clicking anywhere on the record. (The view always selects an entire row on receiving a mouse click.) Click on the delete button and the record will be deleted ( also any duplicates of the record!). You will be given a chance to commit or rollback the transaction.
  • Inserting a record.
    To INSERT a record, fill all of the star'ed fields in the last row with an appropriate value. Then click the insert button. Again you will be given a chance to commit or rollback the insertion.
  • Updating a record.
    To UPDATE a record, navigate to a view containing the desired record. Fill in the star'ed fields in the last row and then select the record to be modified. Then click the update button. A dialog will pop up showing how many records will be modified and you will be given a chance to rollback or commit the transaction.
  • Exiting the Editor.
    To EXIT the editor click on the "close" button in the navigation area.
  • Warning
    If a cell contains LoNgFiElD: the contents do not reflect the true value of the table. Editing actions will probably fail. This abreviated display can be surpressed by ticking the "Show Long Fields" menu item in the File menu of the main window.
• Navigation
  
  • Navigation via Cursor
    The first row of the navigation bar has buttons "<",">" and a field that can contain an integer. Adjacent to this group is a menubutton labeled "Move" followed by a field that can hold an integer. When the editor is opened a cursor is created and these fields can control the placement of the cursor. When the ">" button is clicked the text field is checked its value say "n" is used to fetch and display the the next "n" entries of the table and the cursor is advanced appropriately. Clicking the "<" fetchs and displays the previous n rows of the table. Clicking the Move button will show a menu with two choices "Move absolute" and "Move relative". Choosing one of these item will move the cursor to an absolute position specified by the textfield to the right of the menubutton, or to an offset from the current cursor position using the contents of the text field. No records will be fetched. Clicking on the "<" or ">" will fetch from the new cursor position. Cursors are frozen in the sense that as updates, inserts or deletes are performed the changes will not be able to be seen. To get around this problem after operations that change the table the cursor is closed and then reopened. It is my (limited) experience that it is difficult to find information in the table by randomly scrolling through the record set unless the table is quite small.
  • Navigation by Selection.
    The second row of the navigation area consists of a text field and a button "Use Filter". Whatever is found in the text field is appended to:

    select * from table where

    When the "Use Filter" button is clicked the contents of the resulting string is executed and the results displayed in the grid. Suppose we are editing a table named "bills" then if the text field contained "category='Medical'" (no double quotes in the actual entry) and the Use Filter button is clicked then the sql statement:

    select * from bills where category='Medical'

    would be executed and the rows would be displayed. If the text field contained "true" (no quotes) then the sql statment:

    select * from bills where true

    would be executed and ALL of the rows would be displayed. This would not be a wise thing to do if the table had millions of rows. However, we can limit the number of rows displayed by placing:

    true limit 1000

    in the text field. The resulting statement would be

    select * from bills where true limit 1000

    This statement would retrieve 1000 rows from the table.
  • Warning.
    The two navigation methods are totally unconnected. If you display some records via the filter mechanism and then click the ">" button a new set of records will be displayed from the cursors current position which is unaffected by the Use Filter button.
• Miscellaneous
  
  • Copy and Paste
    Copy and Paste are useful. You can navigate to a page containing the desired record to update. Click on the desired row. This will select the entire row. will copy the row. Click on the "Buffer" row and do a paste . This will paste the entire row into the buffer row where it can be modified.
  • Manual Data Entry.
    To manually enter data into the buffer row, click on the first entry and start typing. The cells will auto clear on the first keystroke. Tab or Right will move to the next cell. Control-Tab or Left will back to the left one cell.
  • How does it work?
    Suppose we have a table foo with columns c1 c2 c3 suppose further we have selected a row with contents a1 a2 a3 and the buffer contains b1 b2 and b3. Then the UPDATE command would look like

    update foo set c1='b1',c2='b2',c3='b3' where c1='a1' and c2='a2' and c3='a3'

    An INSERT command looks like

    insert into foo values('b1,'b2','b3')

    The DELETE command would become

    delete from foo where c1='b1' and c2='b2' and c3='b3'

    Note that the contents of the cells are quoted by the program. This needs a bit of tweeking to handle the cases of the special values NULL and DEFAULT. If the strings NULL or DEFAULT are found in the buffer (case is important). The update and insert commands will be tweeked. Suppose in the above we have b3 containing NULL and b2 contains DEFAULT and a1 contains NULL. Then the above three commands will become

    update foo set c1='b1', c2=DEFAULT, c3=NULL where c1 is NULL and c2='a2' and c3='a3'

insert into foo values ('b1',DEFAULT,NULL)

delete from foo where c1 is NULL and c2='a2' and c3='a3'

  PgBrowse-1.4(source) released Dec 12, 2005.

Also available is a StarPack for Linux-x86 users located here.

Mac OSX users will want to try the bundled standalone application located here.

Windows users will have to download the source and run the program in the usual way.

What is new in this release?

• Fixed a problem where the global variable longFields was getting munged when starting the editor. This prevented editing fields with more than two hundred characters.
• I have added a "reserved word", BYTEA. Spelling and case are important. If BYTEA appears in the buffer area (note no quotes) then when the update or insert buttons are clicked a file open dialog will appear and the user may choose a file to be used as the contents of the field for the operation. The file will be (hopefully) properly escaped...Of course the column should have the bytea attribute.
• I changed the initial size of the editor window to show just one record. This came about when I tried editing a table with many multimedia components and showing twenty records at once taxed my small system.
• Be sure to tick the "Show Long Fields" in File menu before invoking the editor, updates/deletes will *not* work properly if a field shows LoNgFiElD:mmm in a table row that you want to update.
• Note that Tktable does not display excessively long fields (think big Tiffs) properly. After you insert a graphics item you can check the result by going back to the main window and use the contextual menu to see the results. Note due to a bug in the Img package, pdf items will hang the program when one attempts to view the item via the contextual menu. ( You can extract the item and use a PDF viewer to see the item.)

  PgBrowse-1.5(source) released Dec 17, 2005.

Also available is a StarPack for Linux-x86 users located here.

Mac OSX users will want to try the bundled standalone application located here.

Windows users will have to download the source and run the program in the usual way.

What is new in this release?

• Status window gives info on finding psql and the Img package at program startup time.
• Fixed a problem where columns that had upper case letters in their name were not recognized in the editor.
• Added a "reserved" word LOBJ. If LOBJ appears in the buffer area of the editor then clicking the update/insert button will open a file selector box and the user can select a file that will be inserted into the database as a large object. The oid of the created object will be placed into the users table corresponding to the column where LOBJ appeared. The user will be given a chance to rollback/commit the action.

  One needs to take care in dealing with large objects. If a row is deleted and that row contains the only reference to the large object (its oid) then it can be a bit tricky to recover the large object from the pg_largeobject table. See the contributed vacuumlo application for a possible way to clean up the large object table.

  PgBrowse-1.6(source) released Dec 29, 2005.

Also available is a StarPack for Linux-x86 users located here.

Mac OSX users will want to try the bundled standalone application located here.

Windows users will have to download the source and run the program in the usual way.

What is new in this release?

• Added "Postgresql Documentation" item to the Help menu. Selecting this item will bring up a window that will display, in html, all of the Postresql documentation using the package Tkhtml and a modication of the hv.tcl demo program. This is probably most useful to Windows users.

  PgBrowse-1.7(source) released Jan 9, 2006.

Also available is a StarPack for Linux-x86 users located here.

Mac OSX users will want to try the bundled standalone application located here.

Windows users will have to download the source and run the program in the usual way.

What is new in this release?

• Corrected error that prevented "Postgresql Documentation" from being opened more than once per session.
• Added the ability to save the contents of the SQL window. By default the saved file will have an extension of ".sql" and will be written to the "~/SQLScripts" directory.
• Added the ability to refresh the scripts menu while the program is running.
• Added MouseWheel support (each event scrolls 5 units).

  PgBrowse-1.7a(source) released Feb 2, 2006.

Also available is a StarPack for Linux-x86 users located here.

Mac OSX users will want to try the bundled standalone application located here.

Windows users will have to download the source and run the program in the usual way.

What is new in this release?

• Added a "Open Scripts Folder" menu item to the Scripts menu. This allows the user to open the Scripts folder on the Desktop.
• The "Save SQL Results As Formatted File..." menu item now will generate reports that have numeric columns right justified.
• Renamed the "Table Info..." menu to "Table Editor & Information" to more accurately reflect its use.

  ImgViewer-0.7.1 released May 12, 2004 is a program that can be used to view all of the photos (gifs, jpgs, etc) in a directory. After the user chooses a directory, the directory is scanned and a set of thumbnails is created and displayed in the main window. Thumbnails are highlighted and their name and size will appear in the "button bar" as the mouse passes over them. Clicking on a thumbnail will generate a full sized picture in a seperate window which can then be scaled up or down via the "Zoom In" and "Zoom Out" buttons. (The zoom button implementation is via Richard Suchenwirths scaling code). A recent version of Tcl/Tk and the Img extension are needed.

There is problem for Aqua Tcl/Tk users: If am image has a height or width in excess of 4k pixels, then Wish will crash when attempting to emplace the large image onto a canvas.

• ImgViewer 0.7 Initial release May 11,2004
• ImgViewer 0.7.1 May 12, 2004. Added trap so a cleanup could be done in case the close window button was not used.

  ImgViewer-0.9.1 released May 25, 2004. This release revises the interface so that the thumbnails are displayed in a single columned frame. Clicking on a thumb will display an enlarged version of the picture in an adjacent frame. I have added a "slideshow" button that will display each enlarged picture for 5 seconds.

• 0.9.1 Released May 25, 2004. Added code that hides the thumbnails while the slide show is running
• 0.9 Released May 23, 2004

  Ofx2csv. released Feb 21, 2006 is a simple program that extracts transaction details from OFX 1.x documents that are typically obtained by downloading account information from Banks or Credit Cards. ( Quicken and MS Money both understand this format). The transactions are extracted and displayed in an editable table. After making the edit changes the user can save the file as a csv type file which can then be imported into almost any database. My personal financial databases require a Category field for each transaction. I use a category field as a "foreign" key in my database. This means that specifying a nonexistant key or a miss-spelled key will abort the importation of the CSV file. The program eases this problem by having a list box containing all of the foreign keys. Selecting a category field in the table and double clicking a member of the list will cause the selected category field to be replaced with the item that was double clicked.

  Ofx2csv-0.8. released Feb 4, 2007. The only change in this release is the addition of a popup menu that simplifies changing the "Category" field. The popup menu is invoked by "Control-Button-1" in a "category field". The selected menu item will replace the contents of the cell where the mouse click occured.

Send mail to me (Jerry LeVan) if you have any problems/questions....
Back to my HomePage.

Counter courtesy of http://www.digits.com

Last update Feb 4, 2007