Brian,
Thank you, I get it now (and how <B> etc works, ie only if you had put
bold or underline within a field, not when added (around) a field in
the report definition.
Concerning italics, it would be really helpful if DataPerfect could
support this natively (without having to add printer codes in the report
definition).
Victor Warner.
Brian Hancock wrote:
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
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
Dataperf mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.dataperfect.nl/mailman/listinfo/dataperf
_______________________________________________
Dataperf mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.dataperfect.nl/mailman/listinfo/dataperf
_______________________________________________
Dataperf mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.dataperfect.nl/mailman/listinfo/dataperf
_______________________________________________
Dataperf mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.dataperfect.nl/mailman/listinfo/dataperf
_______________________________________________
Dataperf mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.dataperfect.nl/mailman/listinfo/dataperf
