<html><head> <title>Metakit sample code - Struct</title> </head><body bgcolor=white> <font face=Helvetica size=3> <!--begin--> <h2><img src="e4app.gif" alt="App Icon" border=0 align=left> Metakit sample code - Struct</h2><br clear=left> <p>This application highlights some low-level aspects of the Metakit library. </p> <p><b>What it does</b>: Struct is a little utility which displays the data structure of any Metakit datafile on standard output. The output uses a text-mode graph to display the data structure, which can be useful to determine what information is stored in a specific Metakit datafile. </p> <p><b>What it illustrates</b>: For demonstration purposes, Struct has been compiled as a real-mode small-model MS-DOS utility program. It shows how you can extract structural information from a Metakit datafile without knowing anything about it. The sample code includes a general "StructureMap" class to generate text-based graphs. The size of the STRUCT.EXE program demonstrates how small a fully self-contained application using Metakit can be. </p> <p>Note that although Struct must respect the very severe 64 K memory limit imposed by small-model MS-DOS, you can still use this program to examine the structure of files of any reasonable size. The reason for this is that Metakit implements on-demand loading, and that Struct never accesses the actual data itself.</p> <p><b>How to use it</b>: To examine the structure of a datafile, simply run STRUCT.EXE from the MS-DOS prompt with the filename as argument. There are a few command-line options to control the output format, these are listed when you start Struct without a filename. They are: </p> <ul> <dl> <dt><b>-d</b> </dt> <dd>Show a linear description instead of the default tree. </dd> <dt><b>-t</b> </dt> <dd>Show a linear description of the structure, omitting the property names.</dd> <dt><b>-c </b></dt> <dd>Show column structure instead of the deafult tree structure (advanced).</dd> </dl> </ul> <p>You can redirect the output to file, just as with any other MS-DOS program. </p> <p><b>Known problems</b>: None. </p> <p><b>Files in EXAMPLES\STRUCT</b>: </p> <p>STRUCT.CPP - Struct main program <br>STRUCT.MAK - MSVC 1.52 project makefile </p> <!--end--> <center><p><hr size=1> || <a href="index.html" target="_top">Roadmap</a> <a href="classes.html">Class Index</a> <a href="samples.html">Sample Index</a> || <a href="intro.html">Introduction</a> <a href="tips.html">Tips and Tricks</a> || </center> </font> </body></html>
