I have a sticky problem, and maybe one of you has a cool solution:
One of the apps I'm working on presents lists of tabular data, which may
have as many as a couple thousand rows and potentially dozens of columns.
I need to be able to display these quickly, as well as sort them, and to
extract a subset of rows for display.
I've tried multiple fields, which gives us the best look (very
spreadsheet-like), but even with MC's much-improved field manipulation doing
the ol' "put item j of line i into line i of fld j" takes far too long on
large data sets (using "repeat with..." helps, but not enough).
And of course, using MC's built-in tabs doesn't work well for this, since
adjusting the tabs can push adjacent columns off in a line where the sgtring
length exceeds the tabstop for that column.
The ideal solution would be to have a true multi-column list object, but
we'll have to wait for that. In the meantime, it occurs to be that there
may be another way around this:
Is there a quick way to break a large set of tabular data into columns?
It's really easy to get all the columns of a particular row ("get line
200"), but is there some way to effectively turn this on it's side, to
effectively say something like "get column 3"?
If I could quickly break the data into columns for display, then I only have
one "put" for each field, which would be satisfyingly quick. And I could
still sort rows in the master set, spliting them into columns each time I
need to display. Sweet.
Any suggestions?
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World
Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web
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