Zugg Software :: View topic - Editing multi-line text in an external database record

Apprentice Joined: 18 Jan 2001 Posts: 116 Location: USA

Hi,
I've got a script to log all identify output to a sqlite database. I'd like to set something up so users can add/edit notes about items in the database from within cmud. The notes might be multiple lines. I can read multi-line fields into variables in cmud, but I'm not sure how to offer them up for editing. Is there a way to accomplish this?

Thanks in advance,
John

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

There is, of course, but it will take quite a bit of scripting on your part. As long as you're storing the lines in an accessible format though, then you should be able to add, delete them, and change them at will. I'm not exactly sure where you feel you're stumbling? Such a project may be a bit tedious, but certainly not beyond your abilities if you've established what you've mentioned you have thus far.

Apprentice Joined: 18 Jan 2001 Posts: 116 Location: USA

I'm willing to deal with a bit of tedious scripting on my part, but I'd like to avoid a tedious interface for the end users. I'm hoping to find some way to do something like open an editor window with all the text inside, let the user change the text, and click a button when they are done... kind of like you can prompt for the value of a variable. Is something like that possible, or am I looking at the kind of interface where you have a command to show the current value with line numbers and then have aliases for the user to add/replace/delete lines by number? That would be.... unfortunate. :)

Thanks again!

Apprentice Joined: 18 Jan 2001 Posts: 116 Location: USA

Based on the lack of responses, I'm moving forward assuming that I can't do what I wanted... I'm now entering note data for items in my database using a separate sqlite client. I have now run into another issue. I'd still like to display the note data within cmud, but when I query the database and #ECHO the note field to the screen it shows the data all on one line. The carriage returns are stripped out. Is there any way to solve this?

Sample data:

This is the first line of notes...
and this is the second.

Sample output from #SHOW $row.Item("roomNotes")

This is the firstline of notes...and this is the second.

Thanks again for any help.

Wizard Joined: 22 Mar 2007 Posts: 2320

There really isn't an easy way to include carriage returns in a variable value that will display well. One option would be to replace all carriage returns with some tag you make up before storing it to the database, and replacing the tag with %cr in your display code.

GURU Joined: 23 Dec 2000 Posts: 4834 Location: USA

Make your variable a stringlist wherein each line is an element of said list. When it's time to display, you can then use %expandlist() or %replace().

Wizard Joined: 22 Mar 2007 Posts: 2320

I considered suggesting that, but the data is coming from a Cmud database. I don't think you can store a stringlist in that, can you?

Apprentice Joined: 18 Jan 2001 Posts: 116 Location: USA

It's data in a sqlite database, which doesn't support stringlists. I guess I can put tags in the text columns of my sqlite database, but that'll be kind of ugly. It seems like cmud should be able to handle carriage returns in external data. If I create a variable within cmud and put carriage returns in it, then #ECHO displays the contents of the variable correctly...

Thanks again.