Bitrix Forum Reader

Lightweight forum messages viewer generated by 1C Bitrix forum

Development stack

C/C++/Qt/qmake/QML

Arhitecture

• cURL library to download web content
• Pure C Google Gumbo library to parse HTML5 contents
• Qt bindings classes with low-level API to convert Gumbo data to Qt types
• Parser class with high-level API to extract only required data
• C++ data model as a bridge between parser and QML frontend
• C++ QML files generator using data above
• QML frontend to show forum messages

Motivation

Bitrix forum HTML generator overwhelmed it with useless stuff like ads. But i just want to read and save messages to do some analysis later. Browser cannot do this automatically - so i've just write a parser with frontend to it. And the real reason - fun, fun and more fun, as famous mr. Torvalds suggests :) I just like to write and use parsers.

Status: alpha

• Only forum messages viewer implemented, no analyzer
• Only banki.ru "flame" forum pages were currently tested
• Deplyment must be done manually (windeployqt etc.)
• Android packages can be built using Qt Creator
• iOS ones should work too, not tested yet

Plans

• Desktop packages (WiX installer for Windows, DMG for Mac and Snap/Flatpak packages for Linux)
• Publish on AppStore and Google Play
• QBS support for mobile platforms (still not working, just check Qt bugtracker)
• Serialize full message history to SQLite database
• Implement database analysis to extract useful info, e.g. global/local user reputation
• Implement "version control" to control moderators actions

Install

Prerequisites

Note: cURL is bundled with project for mobile platforms and Windows/macOS; on Linux it must be installed manually

• Qt 5.8+
• Windows: Visual Studio with Platform SDK
• Linux: gcc and other build tools installed (sudo apt-get install build-essential on Ubuntu), cURL development package
• macOS/iOS: Xcode 7 and newer
• Android: latest Android SDK and NDK r10e and newer

Project feature defines

• GUMBO_DEBUG (verbose Gumbo debug output)
• QT_GUMBO_METADATA (store HTML document data in high-level Qt bindings)
• RBR_DRAW_FRAME_ON_COMPONENT_FOR_DEBUG (show red frame around each message component)
• RBR_PRINT_DEBUG_OUTPUT (verbose debug output from document semantic analyzer)
• RBR_DUMP_GENERATED_QML_IN_FILES (save runtime-generated QML files on disk)

Compile

Just use Qt Creator:

• create new session
• open gumbo-parser/gumbo-parser.pro
• open bitrix-forum-reader.pro
• open second project properties and mark gumbo-parser project as a dependency
• press "Run"

Also one can use terminal, e.g. for Linux desktop debug build:

• cd gumbo-parser && qmake -spec linux-g++ CONFIG+=debug gumbo-parser.pro && make qmake_all
• cd .. && qmake bitrix-forum-reader.pro -spec linux-g++ CONFIG+=debug && make qmake_all
• Windows/mobile: launch windeployqt/macdeployqt/androiddeployqt tool to deploy all required Qt libraries
• Linux: add Qt libraries to LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable before launching the app