Like I said, I’m not as familiar with Dashboards as I’d like to be, and am trying to figure them out more.
Any chance you provide an example of this kind of Dashboard, and what it would show for a display expression count (sad, in an Outline view)? I think it would better help me understand the value of using Dashboards for this purpose, how they can be applied – and perhaps rethinking my organizational approach for containers and agents, etc. in Tinderbox.
Thanks for considering this request…
I think the Help menu’s “Dashboards and Agents” works through an example of this. I’ll try to develop a small sample separately.
Thank you so much, @eastgate – that would be hugely helpful! For me, it’s always much easier for me to see visual examples of some of these things at play, as it helps me connect the concept in code (which often feel abstract) to how they work out in actuality.
Many thanks again for all of your help…
Here’s a simple dashboard that I >cough< dashed off.
We’ve got a container /draft that holds a few notes about meals. Another container, /dashboard, holds some progress indicators. That’s shown above.
How many meals are there? That’s the first dashboard note. It has a simple rule:
$Subtitle=$ChildCount(/draft)
It’s just going to and grabbing some information another note knows, and displaying it in a more convenient place.
How many words are in the whole container? That’s slightly more complex. First, we go out an add up the word count for each note in the container.
$MyNumber=sum(children(draft), $WordCount);
Then, now that we know the number, we format it nicely.
$Subtitle=$MyNumber.format("l")
The “l” or “local” format adds whatever formatting is customary in your computer’s locale. If you’re using “American English”, is adds a comma for the thousands separator. If you’re using Italian, you’d get a period.
Here’s the document:
Dashboard Example.tbx (106.5 KB)
Ah. Gotcha. Any chance it’s possible to see this in Outline view…?
Sorry – I just rarely use maps; I’m almost always working in Outline (though I’m trying to better familiarize myself with Timeline and Attribute Browser).
Thank you…
Here, I’ve used a rule to set $MyNumber=sum(children(draft), $WordCount);. Then, the note’s DisplayExpression is simply "WORD COUNT: "+$MyNumber.format("l").
But it’s easy enough to have a tab for your dashboard and another tab for your outline.
Thanks very much for putting this all together. I’ll read through this more carefully and download your examples so that I can better understand this concept and how I can apply it for my own purposes.
Thanks again for your help.
