custom fields right into the notes area via {fieldname} placeholders

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Posted by donleone
Jul 15, 2014 at 11:34 AM

Does anybody know some outliners / info-managers,
that are able to insert custom fields data right into their notes area itself,
such as for example via {placeholders} in sentences and the like…

so far i know that

- AskSam can do it

- Word (via its “mail-merge”) and Excel (via functions pulling cells) can do it too

- Chaos Intellect (via again its “mail merge” function) can do it too
(http://www.chaossoftware.com/university/Intellect408-Email_Merge_with_templates.aspx)

- InfoQube via its in-voice generation module can do it
(http://www.infoqube.biz/Features/invoices2.png?attredirects=0)

- Alventis (and many other Database Software’s, via their reporting engine can do it)
(http://www.alventis.com/en/Assets/minitour/AlvReportA.png)

- then DataGuardian can also be cleverly “exploited” to create the same effect,
via its most unique combination of providing simultaneously
1. unlimited custom fields (even dropdowns / yes_no checkboxes etc.)
2. unlimited custom fields in columns
3. unlimited search folders with many combo-options
and
4. custom views with fully arrange-able columns for each search folder ;-)
(only that of course the output would be right in the columns themselves)

- Southbeach Modeller can do it in many creative ways
(which i am currently in-depth examining)

but i wonder, if any of you perhaps know some more/others as-well,
since such a feature obviously makes the data so much more useful
rather than to have it simply “locked up” in some dropdown box.

thanks for any tips.

greetings
donleone

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jul 15, 2014 at 03:42 PM

Zoot can do this to some extent. You type the label and the delimiter (usually “:”) into the text and then you can use that as a column heading in the grid. So it would just look like this in the text…

Address: 2 One Way Blvd

Then you can just highlight “Address:” and drag it into the grid headings bar to add that as a column. See this screenshot:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/155244/Zoot-field-delimiter.png

http://www.zootsoftware.com/

Steve Z.

Posted by donleone
Jul 15, 2014 at 04:57 PM

Stephen Zeoli wrote:
Zoot can do this to some extent. You type the label and the delimiter
>(usually “:”) into the text and then you can use that as a column
>heading in the grid. So it would just look like this in the text…
> >Address: 2 One Way Blvd
> >Then you can just highlight “Address:” and drag it into the grid
>headings bar to add that as a column. See this screenshot:
> >https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/155244/Zoot-field-delimiter.png
> >http://www.zootsoftware.com/
> >Steve Z.

that is really a special & unique function!

Just tested it, and it even updates the data in the column field,
when the text in the notes field is changed.

(just a simple click on the column - and it refreshes it with the change)

i also just to my amazing surprise discovered,
that Zoot is even able to have “multi-line fields”,
so that once the field in that fashion is created,
in one in its properties “upgrades” it into a “multi-line field”,
it will from there on even go to pull almost everything
that is below the field (in the notes), up into the column field as-well,
(and one can even have the 1st line next to the “:” empty
and it will still pull as virtually ALL below it up into the field as-well :-)

this surely seems to me extremely powerful,
if one considers theoretically speaking, that thus
1 note can thus be SQUEEZED into 1 single field (!)
(assuming 1 note is like = 1 paragraph/sentence or small snippet)

so that THEN, once we got that small text chunk converted into a multi-line field,
we can then go on to pull it up & arrange it around into a precise desired position,
(and then save the view into a custom one) or much better pull it out in a whole other view / topic context
via simply including that thus new created custom-user-field in the columns of that other view over there…

here a quick screenshot, how it looks:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/12285943/Zoot_multi_line_field.jpg

which seems to me extremely useful, so much so
that i shall have consider the possibilities of this
and shall have to ponder & digest this a bit :-)

but thanks a lot
for this great tip!

Posted by Dr Andus
Jul 15, 2014 at 05:46 PM

donleone wrote:
Does anybody know some outliners / info-managers,
>that are able to insert custom fields data right into their notes area
>itself,
>such as for example via {placeholders} in sentences and the like…

Not sure if this is what you’re looking for, but three features come to mind in ConnectedText:

1) Inclusion (transclusion): you can insert one document (or a part of a document) in the body of another document, so that when you make changes in the source document, the changes are automatically propagated to all the other documents that contain that inclusion. You can do this by using this markup: ((title_of_source_document))

You could assemble tables with such inclusions, but it would be a very manual process.

2) Attributes/properties: you can mark up text up to 256 characters with an attribute or property, and then you can insert a query expression into the body of a document that will pull all those marked-up passages and render them in a table.

E.g. [[$SUMMARY:|+year|title|Author]] would create a table that automatically builds and updates a bibliography with links to the documents in the first column, and then the marked-up elements in the next columns, in this case ‘publication year,’ ‘publication title, ‘authors’). The plus sign means its ordered in a descending chronological order.

This is a lot more automated process than 1).

3) There is also something called “Named blocks” that allows for overlapping annotations (i.e. one part of the passage is marked with one “name,” another part with another “name” that can partially or entirely overlap the previously marked passage.

This is a lot more complex process than 1) and 2).

But all of this is achieved with wiki markup, so it’s not as ‘graphical’ a process as with Zoot, for instance.

Posted by donleone
Jul 15, 2014 at 06:20 PM

Dr Andus wrote:

>Not sure if this is what you’re looking for, but three features come to
>mind in ConnectedText:

ConnectedText is clearly no doubt power-flexible,
so much i got from just even reading its feature-list
and of course the many posts from you about it :-)

but the software has always seemed to me uniquely difficult,
because it provoked me to learn too many new ways & things,
before i could actually “see” any greater power-benefit behind it.

and maybe exactly because of that, CT remains a hidden gem
to those who like you have somehow managed to learn & adapt to it
and are now able to continuously dynamically exploit its usefulness :-)

but as for me, i still seem rather dwarfed by it,
and shall therefore have to find more simpler ways
how to accomplish similar results.

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