Hi Victor and others,
I will pass on the comments to Lew.
The ;;W is an output format that was added in version 2.6x. When you are
working with HTML or XML there are a number of characters that are either
illegal or inadvisable. In particular when an ampersand &, less than < or a
quote < character is used it signifies a special circumstance to XHTML or
XML. Some HTML you can get away with, but there are strict standards for XML
and for XHTML (which is what HTML has generally standardised on). Within XML
the less than < character is reserved to mark the start of a tag, (as in say
<font>). If you want to use this character in the text or data, it needs
special treatment. The special treatment is that wherever you want a < you
should use the sequence < As you can probably see from this this means
the & characters is used as the start of a special character sequence
(called entities) and so wherever you want to have a & you need to replace
it with the sequence & . The ampersand is often used in DP databases in
things like "Mr & Mrs Smith" The ;;W would mean that that name would be
automatically translated to "Mr & Mrs Smith", making it legal in XHTML
and XML.
In DP2.6x it could only be used with AxAy memo type fields. To use it for an
ordinary Ax text field you first need to save the field to an RV, and then
output it is a AxAy;;W DP2.6y solves this problem for you by being able to
apply to Ax;;W Text fields or RVs directly. The ;;W also expands field to
fit so "Mr & Mrs Smith" in say A15;;W would still output as "Mr & Mrs
Smith" in full even though that is 18 characters.
Note that Lew said it would be a lot of work to have it work with the
apply.format[format;data] function, so DP2.6Y does not support it.
Regards
Brian
----- Original Message -----
From: "Victor Warner" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Dataperfect Users Discussion Group" <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2008 12:59 AM
Subject: Re: [Dataperf] New version of DP on the horizon...
It is great that DataPerfect continues to be developed. I have not really
followed the changes to report functionality but need to understand this
some more (to simplify what I do at the moment).
Would there be a guide as how the ;;W command works at present, as I have
tried it in some test reports but it produces nothing "special" for me?
As regards the Windows version: will there be any development of a greater
link / interface with WordPerfect. For example, WordPerfect for Windows
6.x provided a filter which allowed for a DataPerfect database to be read
directly in WPWIN6.x (the only version where I think this was
permitted/developed).
Victor Warner.
Bruce Conrad wrote:
Hi Brian,
These are wonderful changes! Please pass along my thanks to Lew.
When Lew made 2.6x, he asked me what HTML tags to use for ;;W and did as
I recommended, so I have to take full responsibility for it not being
standards-compliant. One of the mistakes that I made was to have
underline codes use the italic HTML tags. It would be best to use the
underline XHTML tags instead, as you have suggested. I know of no good
reason to use italics.
Adding mass deletion would be useful to me.
Thanks again and best wishes,
Bruce
Brian Hancock wrote:
Hi everyone,
Lew has been working on a new version of DP with some improvements for
scripting, and I have had the pleasure of doing some preliminary
testing. Lew doesn't have easy access to the group mailing list and has
asked me to ask a few questions.
The major thrust of the new DOS based version 2.6Y is to support
scripting a little better, this allows it to perform better in web based
applications, and also desktop application which are driven by scripts.
The major change is that by default if you use the /EI switch to import
data from a transaction logs, then reports will output to STDOUT (often
referred to as printing to the console). For example if you run the DOS
DIR command at a DOS screen the output streams onto the console screen,
and after DIR has finished you can still read the output on the console.
In contrast a DP report printing to the screen only displays while DP is
executing, and is removed from the screen after you exit the report and
before DP exits. There are a couple of advantages to being able to
output to STDOUT (or the console). Firstly at present to use output from
DP in another program you first have to save it to a file in DP, and
then open the file with another program to use the data. It is currently
not possible to pipe data from one application into another. Many DOS
users would be used to piping the output from DIR to the MORE command
so you can view the output a page at a time. There are many advanced
text processing tools which could be used with DP more quickly and
efficiently, such as AWK amd SED, etc. The new version allows piping to
secondary processes.
A major advantage of using STDOUT for output from DP is that data can
be sent directly to a web browser or other internet application. At
present you need to save the output from DP into a file, and then with
another program read the file and output it to the web browser. This has
two problems, firstly, there are more steps to getting data to the
browser and so is slower, and secondly, until a report finishes and DP
exits nothing can be sent to the browser, so there is often a long
period of inactivty until the web browser's screen suddenly fills with
data. (users often think a problem has occurred with this delay). Using
STDOUT, output from DP reaches the web browser screen as it is output
from DP, so even a long slow DP report can present results to the user
while it is still running.
So that is the background to the new version. Some of the changes are:
- the ;;W field output formatter will act on normal text fields and not
just multiline alphanumeric memo type fields
- from a /EI transaction log you can select for more that one report to
run, this is a bug fix from 2.6x. This has great benefits in that you
can compartmentalise reports. For example, you can have a simple report
to add data, another to delete data, and another to edit data, but only
need one report to view the output, With the current 2.6x version you
must either combine sections of the report the output into each of those
operations, or execute DP twice. Now you could specify the two reports
as in #R:=3= #R:=10= to run report number 3 and when that is finished
run report number 10.
- the ;;W acts on all of the XML/XHTML predefined entities,& & "
" ' ' < < > >
- the ;;W transforms a single line break (carriage return) in a AxAy
memo type field to a <br /> instead of <BR> to conform more with XML and
XHTML standards.
- the ;;W transforms two consecutive line breaks in an AxAy memo field
to two line breaks <br /><br /> instead of a single <p>. This also makes
it more conforming to XML and XHTML standards.
- the ;;W transforms bold markup in an AxAy field to <b>...</b> in place
of <B>...</B> to make it conform to standards.
- The Beep function is to be removed
This leads to the questions, currently the ;;W output for an underlined
text in an AxAy field output as <I>....</I> which with HTML indicate
italics rather than underline. Lew believes there was a deliberate
reason for this rather than just an oversight, as you would normally
expect the output to be <u>....</u>. Lew wants to know if this would
cause a problem to anyone before he changes it.
The other question Lew has, in that with scripting using the /EI
transaction log there is no simple way to delete all records from a
panel or to empty the database. You can do these with reports, but in
comparison to the inbuit function to do this, reports are very slow. Lew
would like to add two new functions to the transactions logs. #DA =x= to
delete all the records in Panel numbered x, or #DT: , but before he does
this he would like to see if people would find it worthwhile.
Lew is getting very close to having a candidate for release, but if
there are any other bug bears, now would be a good time to air them and
I will pass them on to Lew.
Lew is also working on a Windows version of DP, but it is early days
yet.
Regards
Brian
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