Notes collected, now what?

This is to be expected as you are setting the OnAdd action. The same will occur in Outline (Chart, etc.) view if you edit $OnAdd as it won’t affect existing children. The whole point of an OnAdd is that it runs once when a note is added to a container or smart adornment.

Anyway, the workaround in map view is trivial. Add an OnAdd action, move the adornment from under the notes then back again - quicker than selecting/moving all the notes. If the adornment is sticky, toggle that off for the brief move (so it doesn’t move the notes) and if a smart agent similarly toggle the query off whilst doing the move.

This is normal with Tinderbox, which unlike many other apps, doesn’t force formalisation (structure) on your notes but lets you add it or alter it as needed. This is a key strength of the app IMO.

There’s an unstated assumption there as to order in AB view. The notes within a category can be set to an order or (I believe) default to $OutlineOrder ordering. As the notes are (re-)sorted when the AB view refreshes I don’t believe ad-hoc sorting is enabled.

No

Yes. Make a container on the map and drag the notes into it.

More on Map-vs-outline and ordering of items.

First thing I tried. Didn’t work. I’ll try again on the assumption that I must have done something wrong, but the initial failure is why I posted.

In the meantime, the Filtered Outline view seems to address the underlying question of how to order Theme-related notes.

Katherine

Rather than using adornments for their OnAdd action, why not use a stamp?

A stamp is what I ultimately ended up using. The advantage of an Adornment is that the notes are already sitting on it, so I don’t need to select them manually.

Sure – adornments are great! But the scenario you described suggested that you were creating the adornment, or moving it, specifically for the effect of its OnAdd action. In that situation, it may be easier to use a stamp.

Well, the specific sequence of events was:

  • Cluster notes together.
  • Draw an Adornment under each cluster in order to differentiate it.
  • Think “Hmm, now that I know what the Themes are, how to assign them to the notes? I’ve already got this Adornment here, can I use that?”

For this project – a few dozen notes – simply selecting everything was pretty easy. For a larger project, I’d want some sort of automation.

Are the themes one-per note (i.e. single value) or a notes has multiple themes (i.e. multi-value)/

Single value, roughly corresponding to the section of the article where they’ll be used.

(That’s the reason for exploding my source notes. An interview might touch on many themes, but a sentence or short paragraph from that interview will only have one.)

Then, as per @eastgate’s suggestion, I’d go with stamps. By all means use map adornments to help with triage but set the [name?] attribute value via stamps (or quickstamp. The notes can stay within the same (map) container when viewed as an outline. But, you can then sort the Outline via [theme] and then $Name.

Notes sorted into themes. Adornments and $Theme attribute applied. With the Adornments already set up, applying $Themes to new notes from a new interview conducted this morning was straightforward.
Notes for each theme reviewed and summarized in a note with its own Outline theme.

Wanted to export the Outline notes to a separate document in the order they appear in the Tinderbox Outline view. That turned out to be more challenging than I expected. I was able to export them just fine, but the order was somewhat mysterious. I even glued them together to make a Composite note in Map view, but the order in which the components were exported didn’t match the order in the Composite. Not a big deal for now – Scrivener has plenty of ways to shuffle things around – but definitely a long term impediment. What am I missing?

Also, a minor annoyance. The tendency of adjacent notes to automatically stick together at the slightest provocation is irritating, making it too easy to accidentally create a Composite. Is that behavior adjustable?

1 Like

Set $NeverComposite for the note(s) to True. You can do this in the note(s)’ prototype, or via a stamp, or open Document Inspector > System and change the Default for the NeverComposite attribute to True.

1 Like

I’ve not encountered this, but you’ve only told us what didn’t happen as opposed to steps we can take to try and replicate the problem.

Composites have nothing to do with export and are an affordance of map view. As has already been explained above just turn the feature off if you don’t need it.

To understand ordering in map vs outline views, see here.

Outline view for this file looks something like this:

  • Intro
  • note I don’t want
  • note I don’t want
  • Section 1
  • more notes I don’t want
  • Section 2
    and so on.

For my first attempt, I used a filter in Outline view to extract just the notes I wanted and used the Export command. I actually got all the intervening “notes I don’t want,” too. (Possibly user error. )

After the Outline view didn’t give the results I wanted, I used the Map view because it appeared to give more control over what was actually selected. (That is, the Outline view appeared to be selecting “hidden” notes that were excluded by the filter but lay in between the desired notes in the Outline order.) And I used a Composite – deliberately in this case – to ensure that the notes were arranged in the order I wanted, which matched the order I had already created in the Outline. (I verified the Outline order to be sure.) However, even though both the Outline view and the Composite in Map view had the notes in the correct order, the exported file did not.

Katherine

Ah - a mispresumption. The Outline filter is for filtering display and review of notes rather that other functions such as export.

It’s also unclear which of the many different types of export you are trying to use. In keeping with Tinderbox’s toolbox approach there no one presumed way to do something, unlike in more functionally limited apps.

To what format are you trying to export? How many discrete file(s) are you expecting to be created? How are you expecting Tinderbox to understand your intent (i.e. order, selection, nesting, etc.)? If unsure, read this page and linked articles. I ask this to avoid writing a long essay covering the many different export methods.

Composites are essentially a visual map(-only)-based feature as are not used for ordering of selecting content but rather for visual association. Note ‘Order’ varies between Map and Outline view (as described in this article (which I linked to several posts ago). That should help make it clear that {X,Y} position on the map has no obvious relation to the underlying outline [sic] used for export.

Export as Text, expecting to obtain a single RTF file containing about six of the several dozen notes in the TBX file. The selected notes are all at the same (top) level of the Outline hierarchy, and appear in the Outline in the order I want in the output, but not next to each other.

I already read the “Export” link you posted, and reviewed it again just now. Without a deeper dive into the documentation than I’m prepared to do at the moment, it isn’t clear how the order of the exported notes is specified. If neither the Outline nor the Map is used to determine the user’s intent – again, in my case, they match – what is?

One would not think that selecting six notes and concatenating them to an RTF file would require an extended foray into any program’s documentation. But from what I have been told in this thread:

  • I can’t use the Map view, because it isn’t used for ordering of content.
  • I can’t use the filtered Outline view, because it’s for display and review, not export.
  • I can’t use the Attribute Browser, because it doesn’t allow reordering of content.
  • I can’t use the main (unfiltered) Outline view because I have too many notes to see the specific ones I’m interested in. (Which is why I tried the three alternatives above.)

I’m starting to run out of choices here…

  1. Select the notes whose text you want to export
  2. The concatenated text will appear in the text pane. Notes will be ordered in the order in which they appear in the outline.
  3. Copy the text, paste it into whatever editor or layout program you use.

You’re done!

Another approach — useful from map view, too.

  1. Select the notes you want to export
  2. From the menu, choose File ▸ Export ▸ As Text
  3. Choose to export only the selected notes. Choose the format you prefer, and export!

This exports the selected notes in outline order. If that’s not the sequence you prefer:

  1. Make a new container
  2. Make an alias of each note of interest, and drag the alias into the container
  3. Arrange the aliases in the sequence you prefer
  4. Select the aliases, and export as above.

Did that. They didn’t export in Outline order. Hence my extremely frustrated post.

Katherine

Please email your file and a list of the notes you meant to export to bernstein@eastgate.com; I’ll take a look. But the first suggestion will be a good workaround for the present.

Done. Included both a screenshot showing what I wanted, and the output file showing what I got. – Katherine