Venn just wants to have fun

  • Today I’ve a call scheduled with attorney trying to sell his services and I was trying to figure all areas where attorney would be useful.
  • As always I outlined everything I could think off
  • AND THEN it occurred to me, I can organize my thoughts slightly better visually (which I always wish I could but never do), I finally spent 15 minutes with Tinderbox building on lessons taught by @satikusala & countless queries answered by @mwra
  • Please note everything is manual , there’s no smart adornment.

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  • QS There is a adornment called Export Business (set as SEND BEHIND) ON which 3 other adornments (employees , suppliers , clients) are contained . Is it possible to resize Export Business adornment and by extension resize adornment on it?

Layer22.tbx (113.5 KB) Please have a look at attachment

Not automatically. If you select all 4 adornments and start resizing one of them it re-sizes independently (not can you make groups of adornments into composites). But, if you work out the ratio if the $Height & $Width of the 3 circles in relation to the background adornment, you could make an action (edict, stamp, etc.) to (re-)set the hight/width of the 3 circles to the same ratio once you’ve resized the background adornment.

Note that shapes are drawn from an {x,y} anchor position equating to the top left corner of the bounding box of the shape (so less obvious for a circular shape!). For your sort of venn diagram arrangement you may still need to rearrange the relative positions of the three circles.

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Oh, right on! This is super fun. We briefly doing a Venn diagram a couple of weeks ago in the Sat. meetup, love seeing it come to life. Nice job!!!

Would you mind if I used this as a basis for a new lesson? I can add in the automation and some export template to show how a report can be built from this.

Ofcourse !!! Please go ahead , it would be great to see what magic you can do with this .

Hi,
Im afraid I have more qs - How do I set the $height in relationship to another adornment ?
$Height=$Height(Adornment??)??

If you are using a designator you could use adornment . However, as there’s scope for misinterpretation where you’ve 3 overlapped adornment, I’d use the $Name of the adornment you know you mean - i.e. the background one:

$Height=$Height("Export Business")*N

where N is the ratio of the heights. Let’s say the above adornment uses one quarter the height of the background one, then the code would be:

$Height=$Height("Export Business")*0.25

If the height of “Export Business” was changed to 8, the code above would set the current object to a height of 2.

I don’t think this approach helps with your Venn diagram as for if that gets bigger you want the circles to grow from the central overlap and not their top left points. I guess you could figure the maths for that too, but I think it would be easier just to re-align manually.

. Note that adornment names are case-sensitive and when used in offset references are not enclosed in quotes.

Thank you again for detailed reply ,

  1. Using $Name , I’m definitely able to update the Height/Width/XPOS/YPOS for rectangular/squares etc. I love it when I’m able to learn and implement something new
  2. You are right , for circles this is not a great solution as the shape of the circle indeed keeps changing from oval to circle as the ratio changes. Re-Align Manually is indeed easier .
  3. I can always try my luck and request @eastgate to look into this for V9 to auto-resize shapes connected.
  4. I have not yet experienced offset references till now , but will read up on this.

See here for more on offset references. Essentially it is the act of getting the value of an attribute from a different note using a designator or its $Name or $Path. $Name is the most common usage, but the full $Path might be needed if the target object does not have a unique $Name within the current TBX.

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This makes sense , for people reading ,assuming my items are in container BB which is in root, it would look like below

$Height=$Height(“/BB/Exports Business”)*.25;

Yes. I’d probably not omit the leading zero on the decimal, given that this has to be parsed out. IOW, is that a full stop, a numerical decimal point or a regex . token? Using 0.25 makes out intent a bit clearer. These aren’t syntax rules as such, but essentially enlightened self-interest. I try to avoid the parser guessing when I can make my intent clear by being more explicit. Tinderbox is actually pretty good at guessing intent when faced with simple ambiguity like this but I prefer not to roll those dice on purpose.

So, all these are also OK:

$Height=$Height("/BB/Exports Business")*.25;
$Height=$Height("/BB/Exports Business")*0.25;
$Height=$Height(/BB/Exports Business)*0.25;
$Height=$Height("Exports Business")*0.25;

Paths don’t need to be quoted as the opening / gives the parser sufficient hint that the following section of text is a path. Whitespace around operators (=, *, etc.) is ignored in action code so add or omit as you prefer.

$Height=$Height(child)*0.25; → get the value from the first child note of this note.

$Height=$Height("child")*0.25; → get the value for the note with $Name ‘child’, matching the first by $OutlineOrder if more than one.

$Height=$Height($child)*0.25; → get the value stored in the user attribute ‘child’ for this note

$Height=$Height(/Test/child)*0.25; → get the value for the note with $Name ‘child’, at $Path ‘/Test/child’ (i.e. avoiding $Name duplication issues.

The $child example shows why it is a good idea to to avoid naming notes (case-sensitively) with titles that are designator names. Likewise, using attribute naming conventions helps stop accidental but avoidable confusion for the parser.

More:

. In cases like me documentation of designators in aTbRef, where such $name values are unavoidable, I’m extra cautious about referencing.

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Thank you sharing these nuances . They are very helpful to me at my learning stage !

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Very elegant!

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