Martin W Smith

In all my software projects now I use SVN for my source control and although very good most of the time, does have a tendancy to break sometimes.

One of the issues I get sometimes is while updating my working copy from the repository, I get the following errors:

“svn: Checksum mismatch for ‘aaa’; expected: ‘xxxxx’, actual: ‘yyy’”

You can ofcourse just delete your working copy and do another checkout, but this is not always an option for me as some of my code is heavily embedded in my development environment. So I needed another solution.

After searching the internet for sometime I came across this blog post with the following solution:

1. checkout a clean copy to a temporary location
2. for new and your problem checkouts, go to the folder where your svn mismatch error is thrown
3. in that folder, go to .svn folder
4. copy the entries file over from the clean copy
5. svn cleanup on the problem folder
6. svn update

Problem solved!

I’m currently working on a project that requires the automatic rendering of files to PDF, MS Office files work ok but there’s a problem with Visio and Tiff files  so I wrote this simple console app in VB.NET.

Module Module1

Sub Main(ByVal args As String())
OpenFileWithAcrobat(args(0), args(1))
End Sub

Private Sub OpenFileWithAcrobat(ByVal InputFile As String, ByVal OutPutFile As String)
Dim AcroAVDoc As Object
Dim AcroPDDoc As Object
Dim b As Boolean

AcroAVDoc = CreateObject("AcroExch.AVDoc")
b = AcroAVDoc.Open(InputFile, "Temp")

If AcroAVDoc.IsValid Then
AcroPDDoc = AcroAVDoc.GetPDDoc()
AcroPDDoc.SetInfo("Title", "")

If AcroPDDoc.Save(1 Or 4 Or 32, OutPutFile) <> True Then
Debug.Print("Error")
End If

AcroPDDoc.Close()
End If

AcroAVDoc.Close(0)
AcroPDDoc = Nothing
AcroAVDoc = Nothing

End Sub

End Module

The app uses Acrobat Professional 9 and takes as its parameters the path of the file to be rendered to PDF format and the path of where the file should be saved to.  eg. renderer.exe “c:\temp\file.tif” “c:\temp\file.pdf”

It works really well as it maintains page sizes and orientation.  It will needs some error handling adding before it goes into production, but for now it works ok.