I am wanting to explode several notes and have them inherit certain (custom) attributes such as “Participant ID” so that I can drill down, stamp individual sentences w/codes, and then run agents across codes without losing Participant ID.
Hi. It looks as though the behaviour you cite no longer works. Reading back through old aTbRef versions it seems that behaviour was added in v5. It is thus likely it got ‘lost’ in the v5->v6 app code re-write and/or got changed in v6 when the ‘Exploded Notes’ prototype functionality got added. Having documented the app for years, things getting added are better covered in terms of announcements than things removed. thus outdated docs until the problem is stumbled across.
I can confirm your findings. I’m a week and a half out from thesis submission so a bit tight on time to experiment, so if in a crunch I’d email Mark Bernstein for chapter and verse as to what should happen. By all means drop me a note as to what is then the status quo with Explode.
Side note: incidentally, you referenced a v7 [sic] aTbRef page which is slightly different in content from the current one (though in this case the above is not changed in the notes). I try to honour old URLS so if you’ve bookmarked an old page, in most cases changing the aTbRef number, i.e. ‘7’ to an ‘8’ in the URL will get you the new page.
Note that since the ‘Exploded Notes’ prototype was added the feature was further altered so you can add and configure it before actually using it in an explode. I suspect the latter is an intended replacement for ‘inherit everything’. In reality you likely don’t want ‘all’ source attributes but rather a specific few. Although the prototype means a bit more work up front it is much more nuanced.
So, add the ‘Exploded Notes’ prototype (if not present) set it to inherit the attributes of interest from the parent doc and likewise to set them in new children (or let them inherit via an applied prototype).
I hope the makes sense. Apologies that this isn’t a good time for me to dive into this subject. I’m actually interested. I think it’s fair to say my feature requests are behind a lot of the features within Explode. For my qualitative work, I’m often importing large amounts of data. Also, a pattern I use a lot is to pull out a strand of info from source notes, i.e. the author’s name, into an attribute, then uses values() to get the set of names, explode that and I’ve a list of per-whatever (here Author) notes that I can then annotate and even link back to associated source notes. Tip, if doing the latter, uses stamps or edicts as it means each new note is processing every other note for a match, often having to also process each value within a multi-value attribute per note for a match. A lot of work! But, a powerful result.
All this changed from Tinderbox 5 to 6, and again more recently; I think this corner of aTbRef is a little behind.
What you want to do, I think, is to take advantage of the new Action in the Explode dialog. This action is applied to each note after it is created. You could use this action to set the Key Attributes for the new notes. Or, you could use the action to set a special prototype for the new notes, and get the key attributes from the prototype.
