OK, all. I have mentioned that in the classroom my students see lots of TiddlyWiki; I freely navigate links, on the big screen, to pull up relevant bits during discussion.
But I'm also a kind of database nerd. In my office I work out of FileMaker. FileMaker is the "back end" of what I do in TW (and elsewhere), for lots of reasons. In TW Classic, I used calculation functions in the database to "extrude" marked-up content to paste in TiddlyWiki. - Example 1: my database has hundreds of quiz question-answer sets accumulated over the years, and in TWC I used a calculation to "dress them up" with Eric's NestedSliders syntax. Paste the complex result in a tiddler and.. Instant fun quiz GUI! <http://ethics.tiddlyspot.com/#Autonomy...> - Example 2: my database has thousands of quoted excerpts from books and articles. I used a database calculation to build a nice slider around each quote (page number and teaser, plus details-style slider to show full quote). After using the find function in the database to bring up a particular subset of quotes, I could grab a tiddler-worth of neatly-formatted excerpts <http://ethics.tiddlyspot.com/#%5B%5BKing%20passages%5D%5D> ready to paste and go. Now, I face a decision: Do I (A) just rework the TW5 calc field in my database (updating so as to dress each quote/quiz element in TW5-specific reveal/details/slider macro syntax, options still under evaluation), or (B) do I figure out how to go all-in on data structure, and use TW5 data features to grab the bits I need from a massive "in-house" JSON tiddler (not thousands of quotes, but hundreds), and use templates to display aspects of the database as desired? The second *sounds* great... HOWEVER (!), I have no experience with manipulating JSON data yet, and grasp only the syntactic basics of how fields and values are paired (plus the fact that FileMaker does have some JSON-handling functions, so export should be possible). With JSON, there would be a learning curve, but I don't know how steep. (I tried mocking up some JSON-looking stuff and pasting it into TiddlyWiki and giving it JSON data "type" and my wiki just blinked back at me and said, OK, there's a buncha funny looking text...) If I understand correctly, it seems the advantage of the JSON approach (once I figure out how to import the data) is that I'd have great flexibility to re-filter things on the fly within TW, and *also* great flexibilty in GUI. So, if I suddenly discover some new display macro approach (in the reveal/details/accordion/slider world) or I realize I want to change which fields to display and how, I modify my template once, and all the tiddlers that rely on it are instantly updated. On my old system, when I became inspired to tweak how these things display, I would have to shuttle back and forth to my FileMaker database, and perform copy-paste operations for each tiddler with the new syntax. So, for those fluent in JSON (and yet not unsympathetic to JSON newbies), would you advise me toward (A), or toward (B)? Or, am I not grasping the choice well yet? By the way, I'm guessing that the path of importing JSON data, if I don't ever convert it into regular tiddlers, seems to place more importance on the possibility of freelinking, since my database of quoted passages uses many terms that are in my glossary, and I've love for them to link, but all the data will stay "under the hood" within the JSON tiddler, right? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/c9ff462a-2581-4f03-b1cf-22f6ffca7a65%40googlegroups.com.
