Rapps Enhancement final report - GSoC 2020

by kernel.bin | August 29, 2020

Hi, I’m He Yang (@kernel.bin), one of the GSoC-2020 students of ReactOS. How time flies, three months have passed and now GSoC is coming to an end. During the last three months, I’ve been working on rapps, and I’ve made some small progress on it: improving rapps by increasing it’s functionality, stability, and make the code more well-organized.

During GSoC, I’ve acquired a lot of coding skills and knowledge about Win32. It’s a precious and unforgettable experience for me, and I’m very grateful to my mentor for his patient teaching, as well as everyone in the ReactOS community who gave me help and advice.

The work I’ve done in past three month

This is the link to the final Pull Request containing the work done by me, you can find the code here. Pull Request 3108

Stage 1

During stage 1, I mainly focused on screenshot and icon support as well as various small improvements.

work done:

Add support for screenshots.
Improve icon support.
Some other invisible improvements.

Stage 2

During stage 2 I mainly focused on improving the listview and related code. This turned out to be a pretty big refactor, and it improved the UI a bit.

work done:

Move ToolBar and SearchBar to AppView, and remove “settings” and “exit” button.
Enable users to choose how to view apps using a ComboBox.
Some small bugfix and improvements.
Some other invisible improvements and refactoring.

More detailed information about work I’ve done during stage 1 & 2 can be found here: GSoC 2020 RAPPS Stage 1 & 2

Stage 3

During stage 3 I mainly focused on improving the command-line options for rapps, turning rapps into a command line app in order to output to console. Some work improving settings storage was also done.

work done:

Using package name in command line instead of software name.
Turning rapps a command-line program. It will detach the console when it is asked to run in GUI mode (e.g. when no parameters are being passed to it).
Add /? command to show basic usage of rapps commandline.
Add /find and /info command (for search and displaying software information)
Some minor improvements. (Allow using - as option prefix, and so on)
Store settings in registry in a more human-friendly form instead of binary form.

screenshots RAPPS screenshot

work left

Because of my limited time and ability, there is still some work left undone. Some is left by me, some are bugs/imperfections that I discovered and didn’t have time to fix. I will list all of them here.

Currently, only first screenshot will be displayed. When there are more, they should be displayed somewhere.
Clicking links in richedit using left button with Ctrl pressed, should just open the browser instead of popup a menu.
Code handling the downloading of apps need a refactor. It should reuse code in AsyncInet.cpp.
Currently, downloaded apps will all be stored in the same folder using a filename extracted from the URL. (The code for this can be found in loaddlg.cpp) there are some problems with this design:
- The URL may not have a filename. for example, see twsynth.txt (in this case we should probably retrieve the filename from the HTTP header?)
- Different apps should be stored in their respective folders, otherwise if the filename in the URL is the same, it could lead to a disaster.
- The URL can be quite long, and it may contain illegal characters. We should make sure it’s shorter than MAX_PATH and has no illegal characters in it.
The current code which reads INI files is really slow. That’s the reason why rapps always takes a long time to start. It should be improved.
When removing installed apps from registry, if there are sub-keys, it will fail. Delete them recursively? (it will fail when we don’t have access to it too, and I think in this case we should tell user about this failure)
Some icons can not be loaded and displayed correctly. More investigation required.
When uninstalling a program, if it requires administrator privilege, it will fail (the code can be found in misc.cpp, the function StartProcess)