qnject

Hello my friend. Yes, this is an another hacky project to make Qt developers life easier. It injects a full featured web server into binary process to modify its behaviours (hook, alter QObjects, etc).

What can it do?

Modify QObject properties on the fly, grab screenshots from widgets, inject assembly code into text segment. Fancy stuff.

Is this ready?

No.

Is this documented?

At some point it will be.

How does it work?

Using DYLIB_LIBRARY_PATH or LD_PRELOAD or ptrace or windows api calls it adds a shared library to a running applicaion. The shared library starts a mongoose server that calls registred plugins when their registed URL handlers are called. It's very cool it's just not ready.

Ok, I'm ready, tell me more

You will need to find a QT version whos ABI is close enough to the version of Tableau Desktop you are using. This may be tricky, but lets trust the QT guys for now.

I will document any version matchings for Tableau Desktop / QT version here so you dont have to go through it.

• Tableau 10.1 : QT 5.6(seems to work...)

Clean way: Using Nix

The easy way out is to use the Nix package manager and use the provided default.nix file to grab everything. As this version does not pin down the Qt version, you may (but unlikely) have to work the version magic of nix and hydra.

Less clean way: Using homebrew

For now, I'm assuming that you are trying this on a mac. Windows is currently untested.

Step 1. Grab QT

I used homebrew to get the proper version, there is a very nice and detailed guide for "How do I install a specific version of a formula in homebrew?"

Step 2. Build the software

After installing QT, homebrew told me:

We agreed to the Qt opensource license for you.
If this is unacceptable you should uninstall.

This formula is keg-only, which means it was not symlinked into /usr/local.

Qt 5 has CMake issues when linked

Generally there are no consequences of this for you. If you build your
own software and it requires this formula, you'll need to add to your
build variables:

    LDFLAGS:  -L/usr/local/opt/qt5/lib
    CPPFLAGS: -I/usr/local/opt/qt5/include
    PKG_CONFIG_PATH: /usr/local/opt/qt5/lib/pkgconfig

So we need to add the proper QT location

# Create a build directory so we are nice and clean
mkdir _build && cd _build
# Generate the build
cmake . .. -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/usr/local/opt/qt5

# By default, command line Cmake creates unix makefiles,
# so we'll use just that
make