Subject:
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Re: Inventory Helper app
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.db.inv
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Date:
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Fri, 6 Apr 2001 13:43:05 GMT
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Viewed:
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824 times
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In my ongoing quest to keep an archive of our discussion,
and with Dave's permission, I'm posting his response to the group.
Regards,
Hakan
Hi Dan,
I'm going to reply to each of the responses I've seen in turn, but will
include you all in cc's so you can see.
> A few questions... first of all, what's wrong with our current
> tab-delimited format? it's both human readable, and easily parsed...?
> I personally have no way of running VB apps, so I can't look at yours...
> I was thinking of writing a perl program to help creating the inventories
> - should be simple enough using Term::Complete and Curses::Forms. Also,
Hmmm. Perhaps I wasn't as clear as I should have been! I did not mean to
imply that there was anything wrong with the tab-delimited format that you
guys use. In fact that is ideally what I had imagined as the *output*
format of any final inventories, and is what I have used in the past when
I did inventories by hand. What I meant to say is that if someone submits
a tab-delimited inventory to you, don't you have to manually input their
data into your master database? Or if you have some scripts to do the
conversion for you, doesn't it screw things up if there is a space when
there should have been a tab, or some field that you don't use has been
added? That's what I meant by automatic parsing of the info: stuff
submitted by other people being entered into your big database.
With the format that I used in my little project, these types of errors
are eliminated because the output of the data-entry process is always
uniform. Though I wrote it in VB because that was my learning environment
at the time, it is really the file format idea that I'm proposing as the
most useful bit. The one format I settled on was just my first attempt at
a structure that would be compact, text only, and clearly delimited to
someone perusing it with a text editor, but I'm sure others could perfect
the idea or come up with a better implementation; as a programmer I'm just
a hobbyist right now. Preferably the inventory helper app would be
written in something x-platform to be the most universally useful. Like a
Java applet or something. But ultimately it wouldn't matter what scripts
or tool are used to make the inventory file, as long as the format is the
same as that understood by the other applets on other platforms or by the
master database that might import them.
> I'm a firm believer in the unix way - small apps that do one thing,
> and do it well. So instead of having a megaapp that will inventory,
> do searches, database and export html, I'd much rather have a set of
> scripts... but hey, that's just me :)
Your point is well taken. But these other features are just things I
thought of as useful to me, and potentially other users, with just the
data from their own collections. I had, for instance, planned to come up
with a way to integrate just my own inventories into a combined database
so I could see how many of a certain part I have, and then what sets they
came from (like what you guys so awesomely provide on your web site). I
think that was discussed recently as a possible future add-on to the
functionality that you offer. Using a helper app, it could be done
locally on the users' machines as well.
The other benefit from using a helper like this is speed. In the dozens
of inventories I have completed since I wrote my little app I have noted a
marked decrease in the time it takes to complete one.
> Hakan forwarded your post to db.inv - do you want to take the discussion
> there?
Taking the discussion to lugnet.db.inv would be just fine, as is quoting
me there, but as I said I cannot post to Lugnet so y'all will have to
forgive and bear with me if my part of the conversation is by email :)
Dave L.
immortus@iname.com
http://immortus.freeservers.com/
~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`
"Too low they build, who build beneath the stars."
-- Edward Young
~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`
--
"Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature"
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