chiana
Project home

Summary	File viewer for fixed length and comma delimited records.
Category	construction
License	GNU General Public License
Owner(s)	pjgrenyer

Mission

At one of my previous jobs we had a file viewer application which allowed us to view and define layouts for fixed record length text files. A fixed record length file contains records that are all the same length. Individual fields are padded out with spaces to maintain uniform lengths.

I want to rewrite this application in C# and have it handle comma delimited record files as well. There are no copyright concerns as I don't have the original source code for the file viewer application I wrote before, it was in C++ and was very specific to the company I worked for.

A few of challenges the project will have are:

1. Grid control - If C# doesn't already have an appropriate grid control for displaying the records, one will have to be written.



2. >4GB files. In the direct mail industry there are frequently files bigger than 4GB in size. In C++ there are problems handling files over 4GB. I don't know if this problem exists in C#.



3. Mono - I'd like the file view to run on *nix as well, so a mentor with Mono experience would be very useful.



4. I want the main project to be open source, but build in some stuff that would be worth paying for (perhaps only having >4GB files on the pay for version).

I also want to do lots of unit testing, most likely using NUnit . You'll also gain skills in version control with Subversion. Manual/help file writers would be good too!

Why Call a File Viewer Chiana?

There's no particular reason to call a file viewer Chiana. I'm a huge Farscape fan and as with Aeryn I decided to name it after another character. It beats calling it File Viewer!

Documentation

Chiana documentation can be found here.

• Chiana User Interface Specification
• Getting Started with Subversion and Chiana

ACCU Mentored Developers

Chiana is an ACCU Mentored Developers project.

License

Chiana is released under the GNU General Public License.

Resources

NUnit - NUnit is a unit-testing framework for all .Net language.

NAnt - NAnt is a free .NET build tool.

Subversion - The goal of the Subversion project is to build a version control system that is a compelling replacement for CVS in the open source community.

TortoiseSVN - TortoiseSVN is a Subversion client, implemented as a windows shell extension.

.Net Framwork - The .Net framework for Microsoft Windows.

Mono - Mono provides the necessary software to develop and run .NET client and server applications on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix.

Paul Grenyer