Rank entries
Fred Aerique
I have had great fun using Tiddlywiki as a relational database so far.
Now I am coming to the point where I want to have ordinal or even
interval data. I give an example:
I have created the tiddlers 'Mark', 'Louise' and 'Sue' and tagged them
'People'.
They all have a little description and a last action point line, so I
know what we last spoke about and whether I need to call them back,
for example. In MPTW I can list those three nicely when opening the
Tiddler 'People' and even see an excerpt of the descriptions.
Now I realize that all three of those are relevant to an event called
'The Big Reggae Festival' that I host. So I add the tag [[The Big
Reggae Festival]] to Mark, Louise and Sue. So far, so good: when I
open the Tiddler 'The Big Reggae Festival' I see that Mark, Louise and
Sue are related to it. But now it comes: Sue is telling me that she
knows about 3 more reggae bands that should definitely play at the
festival and she could get me in touch with those, whereas Mark said
he is somewhat interested and I can send him an invitation, but he
doesn't really know whether he will make it. Now imagine I have 200
people associated to the festival. Then I really have an interest in
Sue coming up on top of the list when I open the tiddler 'The Big
Reggae Festival'.
Ideally, this would be achieved through a user interface that lists
those 200 people in tabular format and I can determine their rank for
'The Big Reggae Festival' through drag&drop. I regard this function as
being extremely useful. If it existed, Tiddlywiki would entirely rule
out any other database software because it would marry qualitative and
quantitative analysis and be the first mover in this field.
Is anyone developing something in this ballpark? Does anyone want me
to get started on it? What's the situation in the Tiddlywiki
community?
Fred
Daniel Baird
> [...]
> Ideally, this would be achieved through a user interface that lists
> those 200 people in tabular format and I can determine their rank for
> 'The Big Reggae Festival' through drag&drop. I regard this function as
> being extremely useful. If it existed, Tiddlywiki would entirely rule
> out any other database software because it would marry qualitative and
> quantitative analysis and be the first mover in this field.
The "proper" way to do this would be to annotate each the
relationships between things. In TW the relationship is represented
by tagging one thing (say, tiddler "Mark") with the name of the other
thing ("Festival"), but unfortunately that means that connection
itself can't have extra data attached to it.
So I can think of three solutions:
1. represent the relationship between Person and Event in a tiddler of its own.
For example you could have a tiddler named something like
"Mark::::::Festival" to represent that connection. Then that tiddler
can have additional tags, like "tentative", "important", "call back"
or whatever, and those tags are applicable to the connection between
Mark and the Festival.
This would be powerful and awesome, but would mean a huge amount of
fiddling with TW.
2. get really clever with custom fields.
You could use some elaborate naming scheme with custom fields to
represent tag-like relationships with additional info. Eg tiddler
"Mark" could have a custom field "attending" with value "Festival",
then other custom fields like "attending_confidence" = "maybe".
Also powerful, but also much fiddling.
3. store an ordering somewhere.
You could attach a "preferred order" list of items to a tiddler, as a
custom field or even just hidden inside a comment in the tiddler
contents. It could list stuff that is tagged with this tiddler, in
your preferred order. Then your drag and drop can just adjust that
list.
You'd have to have a policy of where to show items that aren't on the
ordering list, but I guess you'd want those at the end.
This would require much less fiddling with TW, but isn't as powerful.
Whichever you choose, someone's gonna have to write a drag-n-drop thing.
I've previously discussed this kind of idea with Roger Sperberg, but I
never had time enough to write any code. If he's still in touch with
the list, I suspect he'll be very interested.
Cheers
;Daniel
--
Daniel Baird
/to be or not to be/ => /(2b|[^2]b)/ => /(2|[^2])b/ => /.b/
...optimise your regexes, people!
Ken Girard
attending+tiddler.title checkbox that filled in a custom field in the
target tiddler) in tiddlers designated as an event (tag or custom
field would work).
I started something like this for a wedding planner, then the folks
decided not to have a big wedding. I'll see if I can refind the file.
Ken Girard
On Jun 30, 9:19 am, "Daniel Baird" <danielba...@gmail.com> wrote: