A TiddlyWikified Lens on Spreadsheets

[stevesuny]

Folks,

Thanks to some timely help (thanks Mark & Eric), I've developed an interpretive lens onto a spreadsheet.

See http://sunypoly-schedule-explorer.tiddlyspot.com/ for an example.

• Demonstrates import of spreadsheet data into navigable space. One row per case. Each column a field in each case (as defined in xlxs plugin import manager). Every column/field is can be clicked on to create lists of tiddlers matching field value.
• Start in Classes , and select one. Then select one of the class fields (such as instructor or days, etc.
• A tiddler is created (see schedule elements template, and then rendered using template field value template to display matching tiddlers.
• No other code needed.
• To do
• clean up names of things like "schedule-elements" and "element-fields" etc.
• consider writing tiddlers to temp files

Comments/ suggestions/ improvements welcome.

//steve.

[TonyM]

stevesunny

Thanks for sharing that, I am really impressed. I will look into your method in more detail as I think this method may be key a number of ways to handle data in tiddly wiki.  I see the data is in the relationships between a large number of "objects".

Of course over the internet it is quite slow and that's in my Firefox with dom.max_script_run_time in about:config up from 10 as high as 80 Now, yet I still get timeouts.

Perhaps you could introduce a feature to display the instances grouped by N prefix characters such as
Rooms by 1st letter/number
Classes by first 2-3 letters
Instructor by first letter

If handled correctly they will not need to be rendered until you open a sub group and thus operate more quickly and the amount of data would be less intimidating.

A practical real world question arises to me and that is how will it handled subsequent imports from the same source?, it would be fantastic if it could update existing items without removing additional notes applied to the different objects (I imagine this is already so), and if it could identify deletions and flag them it would be very cool, because you would be able to build and maintain a database from multiple "as at" time reports.

Great Work
Thanks

[Jiří Veselý]

Dne sobota 15. července 2017 3:28:48 UTC+2 TonyM napsal(a):

[PMario]

Hi Steve,

Interesting. ... You could create a "backdrop" tiddler like this:

title:  $:/config/EmptyStoryMessage

{{HelloThere||$:/core/ui/ViewTemplate}}


With this configuration, the "HelloThere" tiddler will be allways on, if the story is empty.

have fun!
mario

[stevesuny]

Tony, thanks.

On Friday, July 14, 2017 at 9:28:48 PM UTC-4, TonyM wrote:

A practical real world question arises to me and that is how will it handled subsequent imports from the same source?, it would be fantastic if it could update existing items without removing additional notes applied to the different objects (I imagine this is already so), and if it could identify deletions and flag them it would be very cool, because you would be able to build and maintain a database from multiple "as at" time reports.

I added an additional field to the xlsx import to accomplish this.  The imported tiddlers link to tiddlers titled static-{{!!title}}. So you can edit the static tiddlers, and reimport data, and your static tiddlers won't be overwritten.

This has made me realize that I've created a general purpose "tiddly wikipedia table annotator" as you can use =importHTML function in google sheets to scrape any table in any wikipedia page (any html page, really), and then the xlsx tiddly wiki importer to import rows of the table as tiddlers, and this set of templates to allow annotation at cell level, including column headings. This will work well for an assignment in my DesignWriteStudio / TiddlyWiki classes; gives writers (importers) an opportunity to add content (as @TiddlyTweeter wants!) in a rich way.

More generally, this becomes a simple table annotator as well.

Thanks for the ideas. Oh, and please, add these features yourself into the next gen. Or bring into a github and make a plugin...

//steve.

[st...@sunypoly.edu]

Reviving an 18-month old thread, and connecting it to a new thread that asks questions closely related to this thread. Note my tiddlyspot wiki demonstrates a generic way to import a wikipedia table and move it along towards being wikified...//steve.