xlsx importer - Field Import Specification Column with line break

[Schulerbot]

Hi y'all,

Stuck here.  Seeing if anyone has run across this.

Trying to import excel spreadsheet report repetitively to create database of tiddlers.

In the primary row of the excel sheet, where the column titles are that specify the pointers for the field import specification, I have a couple columns with line breaks (ALT-Enter in Excel)...Not my choice

How do i specify the line break character in the "column" field of the plugin control so that the plugin finds the correct column and corresponding data to put in the field upon import?

Seeing if I have an option here besides manipulating the excel data. I'd rather just import the existing report as-is that is e-mailed to me.

Thanks!

-Mike

[Jeremy Ruston]

Hi Mike

Trying to import excel spreadsheet report repetitively to create database of tiddlers.

In the primary row of the excel sheet, where the column titles are that specify the pointers for the field import specification, I have a couple columns with line breaks (ALT-Enter in Excel)...Not my choice

How do i specify the line break character in the "column" field of the plugin control so that the plugin finds the correct column and corresponding data to put in the field upon import?

Seeing if I have an option here besides manipulating the excel data. I'd rather just import the existing report as-is that is e-mailed to me.

Interesting problem! As you’ll have discovered, attempts to copy the line break character from Excel and paste it into the editor of the XSLX plugin don’t work. The reason is that those single line text fields don’t allow control characters.

A possible workaround is to identify the tiddler field(s) that need to have these control characters pasted, and to edit those fields in a scrap tiddler via a textarea:

<$edit-text tiddler="$:/_importspec/Presidents and Justices/States/Main/title" field="import-field-column" tag="textarea"/>

Then you should be able to paste the required line breaks into the fields.

The problem you’ll then likely run into is that control characters are removed from tiddler fields when you save and reload as a standalone HTML file. A quick and dirty workaround would be to save the wiki in JSON format (via the export button).

Best wishes

Jeremy

Thanks!

-Mike

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[Schulerbot]

Amazing, thanks so much Jeremy.  Big fan of the Tiddlywiki.

-Mike

[Steven Schneider]

I'm sure you could fix this if you edited the file. One edit-the-field strategies that I've employed: insert a new row at the top of the spreadsheet, and generate a set of useable field names. leave the cell containing the title field blank in this row; when setting up xlsx import, make sure the checkbox "skip if blank" is ticked. I realize this creates an step requiring edit of the xlsx file, which as you noted is not something you want to do. But you must need to open it to get the column names, no?

If you copy/paste-special-transpose the column names into column1 of another sheet in the workbook, you could read in the column names as values in tiddlers (you might set the title of the tiddlers to be =row(), which would give you a # as a hook. You could then transclude these values to the import spec tiddlers ..... but this gets messy quickly.

Jeremy, is there any way to get access to the column number, or is everything in the plugin running on column names (i.e. the text in row1 of the column)?

I've long wanted the xlsx import plugin to be modified so that there was an option to name the fields Column1, Column2, etc to avoid these issues. Similarly, set the title of imported tiddlers as Row1, Row2, etc. An additional feature might create tiddlers for each Column, and populate the caption field for these tiddlers with the contents of Row 1. And populate the caption field of the row tiddlers with the contents of a specified column.

This would save much of the tedium of building xlsx imports, especially for large spreadsheets.

//steve.

On Tuesday, March 6, 2018 at 4:32:44 AM UTC-5, Jeremy Ruston wrote:

[Schulerbot]

Hi Steven,

Thanks for responding, true, I can manipulate the spreadsheets easily to make this work, but i'm trying to fully optimize before resorting to doing that.  A little more about my setup.

I have spreadsheet reports emailed as attachments, for several things that I get for work, and I spend about an hour of the day grabbing data from these reports, manipulating and putting data into other spreadsheets for inventories and other action items, would love to automate-ish this work.

For this question, I get a specific report, its something sent to customers, a widget report of what we shipped to them.  I want to take this email with an excel attachment and drag the attachment into my tiddlydesktop/tiddlywiki (which I keep open most of the day and use as a knowledgebase/intranet) to create a rolling list of shipped assets as a database without having to take the step of opening up the spreadsheet attachment, manipulating the column titles, saving it to an actual location on the machine/server, then importing it to my tiddlywiki.  Because this spreadsheet is formatted for viewing by customers, it has line breaks in the column titles.  I tried endless combinations of line change characters, formatting, and even updating the xlsx.js code tiddler before posting.

I haven't had a chance to try Jeremy's suggestions yet, but I echo the usefulness that an updated controls panel would have for other Excel applications, or even to build an entire tiddlywiki via Excel.  For my application though (importing data repetitively via reports that are consistently formatted), this plugin seems to match quite well.

-Mike

[Steven Schneider]

I took a look at $:/plugins/tiddlywiki/xlsx-utils/xlsx.js, and it's beyond me. But I bet someone with js understanding could figure out how to modify the xlsx plugin so that TW wrote fields into its new tiddlers using column numbers (auto incremented) as field names, rather than the contents of row 1 as field names. 

It's interesting to here about your setup. Thanks, //steve. 

[Schulerbot]

Thanks Steve, what do you use it for, any interesting applications to borrow?

Just to follow up, I tried the edit-text widget method and still couldn't get the field-import-specification text area to match the line breaks or line break characters during import.  

To get the process working, I created an excel macro which will format the file and save it to a specified location ready to import.  Still will save lots of time and only adds one step to building my tiddlywiki database from email reports.  A downside to this method is that it isn't easily scalable outside of my personal workstation.

-Mike