A (failing) Stamp to Create and Link 'Tag' Notes

Agents, Actions and Automation
1

I have a bunch of notes with an attribute, ‘Tags’, being a comma-separated list of tags, sometimes quoted when containing spaces (eg, 'this, that, “the other” ').

I split and rejoin this with semicolons as part of the prototype’s action code, so there’s a semi-duplicated Attribute ‘tbTags’ which contains them in a manner that’s hopefully more native to Tinderbox.

I created a Stamp which should walk through the list of tags, create a note with the tag name in a ‘/Tags’ note (if it’s not there already), then link the original note to the existing or newly created tag. At one stage, I had this partly working, creating the relevant items in ‘/Tags’ before I swapped it over from being an action to being a rule and adding the tag linking.

Can anyone see what’s (hopefully) obviously wrong?

var tags = $tbTags.split(";");
tags.each(myTag) {
	if(!isDuplicateName(myTag)) {
		var tagNotes = create("/Tags",myTag);
		$Prototype(tagNotes) = "Tag";
	}
	// find notes to link to
	if(!linkedFrom("/Tags/"+myTag)) {
		linkFrom("/Tags/"+myTag, "uses tag");
	}		
}

I’m on 8.9.2. I’ve made pop-up messages about errors appear in the past, but this bit of code isn’t triggering any, which would at least give me something to work on!

2 
var tags = $tbTags.split(";");

I don’t think you need to want this. I assume that $tbTags is a list; if so, each will iterate through each item in turn.

You also don’t need to check whether the link already exists, as linkFrom does this check itself.

3

One line declaration like this is not supported in v8.x (but will be in v9). You must use either:

var tags;
tags = $tbTags.split(";");

or

var tags($tbTags.split(";"));

But, as @eastgates notes, you already have a list and down need to pre-check for links, so this ought to work:

$tbTags.each(myTag) {
   if(!isDuplicateName(myTag)) {
      var tagNotes = create("/Tags",myTag);
      $Prototype(tagNotes) = "Tag";
   };
   // find notes to link to
   linkFrom("/Tags/"+myTag, "uses tag");	
};
4

As a general guidance, the best way to approach a complex stamp that’s not doing what you want is to break it up into small pieces — pieces too small to possible fail — and then to test each one.

2 Likes
5

Thanks @mwra and @eastgate - I stripped it right back to the minimum and rebuilt part by part. I know these are sensible practices, but sometimes things seem too obvious to need to apply them :slight_smile:

In the end, it pared right back to

 var tagNote;
 $tbTags.each(myTag) { 
	tagNote=create("/Tags/"+myTag);
	$Prototype(tagNote) = "Tag";
 	linkFrom("/Tags/"+myTag, "uses tag");
}

Fair to say there was a bunch of sanity checking I didn’t need to do, and sanity checking I did need to do that I didn’t think I needed to do.

In this rumoured Tinderbox 9, I’d love it were there to be a ‘log()’ function and a message log window. My scrappy debugging style would be enormously grateful.

6

For better or worse, log() is taken by logarithms. And the system log can be a bear to read.

Idea: make a note named log. When you want to log a diagnostic message, do this:

$Text(/log)=$Text(/log)+"hello, world\n");
3 Likes