Beachball Stuck with CrossTab View

Q & A - getting started with Tinderbox
1

I have a .tbx file which I used as a test to import about 10,000 Pubmed entries.

It works well in Outline view, including filters on various Attribute fields.

I decided to experiment with the Crosstab view; it appears that the data is too large for that. The file got stuck with a spinning beachball from which I have to do a Force Quit.

Tinderbox is fine now if I open any other .tbx file; but if I try to open the same file with the Pubmed imports, it freezes again; it seems to keep defaulting to the Crosstab view on startup.

Is there any way to reset that file back to outline view so it will open?

Any guidance on how large is too large for Crosstab view?

2

The file has already stored the ‘active’ tab in the doc. You can fix this in the XML source. First, if that isn’t something you understand or are willing to try, send a copy of the TBX to support (info@eastgate.com). If it’s big, I suggest you zip the TBX or use a Dropbox/iCloud/etc. download link.

Otherwise:

  • Make a copy of the TBX (so if you do go wrong you’ve lost nothing)
  • Open the TBX file in BBEdit or a similar code editor (do not use TextEdit or a word processor). Note: BBEdit can be downloaded and most features can be used for free.
  • Once open, scroll to the end of the doc. You are looking for a section similar to this, below, from a TBX with a single window and a single Crosstabs-view tab:
<windows >
<window bounds="Rect[ 488 447 1503 1047]" ruler="0" >
<tabs >
<tab selected="1" viewType="7" usingRoadmap="0" hideBreadcrumbs="0" scale="32" ID="1610130169" scrollX="0" scrollY="489" …  />
</tabs>
</window>
</windows>

Note, the <tab /> tag has 65(!) tag attributes so I’ve left most of them out above. Not least because we’re only interested in the beginning of the tag. We are after this bit:
<tab selected="1" viewType="7"

The 'selected ’ attribute is the saved front tab (i.e. active tab when last saved). By making a doc with only one (Crosstabs) tab I’ve confirmed viewType="7" is a Crosstabs view tab.

  • Now delete any line in the document starting <tab selected="1"
  • If there remain any lines starting <tab selected="0"viewType="7" (i.e. background Crosstabs-view tabs) delete these as well.
  • If your document had more than one window open, each <window></window> element will contain one or more tab /> item, so reaeat the above for each window
  • Save and close the file.
  • Open in Tinderbox.

Does that help?

3

Makes perfect sense - I have used Xquery databases and similar so that is very helpful - in fact understanding a bit more about the XML structure of tbx files would be very interesting at some future time if it is documented.

I will work on this tonight or tomorrow and report back. Thanks!

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4

Before someone notes it, the windows/tabs stuff hasn’t yet been fully updated in aTbRef and the <tab> mentioned here has morphed a bit. Now it has 65 attributes - essentially all the tab/view level values that in a note would be attributes. Yikes! On my to-do list…

5

That worked - many thanks

1 Like
6

BTW, I’ve updated my notes on the <tab> tag: here.

2 Likes