Automatic Reports

I'd like to be able to automatically create a report or index based on Categories and Tags. This would allow for a quick "cheat sheet" overview.

1) Define table search parameters -- i.e., City Tag: San Francisco to select all information in RW that has a City Tag equal to San Francisco.

2) Create a table with Tag headers -- i.e., Name, Occupation, Level, Primary Location.

3) Table with links is created by RW and displayed as a snippet.

I'm torn as to whether I'd want it to update automatically or if it should become a static table that can be manually edited/annotated.

+1 to this, would add the ability to save those "queries" as well. Could then return to them any time or modify if u only wished to change a filtered source within original instead of start from scratch. For example change San Francisco to Houston and still keep remaining criteria.

Honestly it would be super cool if RW would allow direct interaction with the Database? As I understand its some SQL - clone / thing? (havn't checked in detail yet, but read about it...)

Then I could select some of my stuff dump it into file...

updating my data would be come a breeze with some inserts & updates....

would love it

AEIOU said:

I'd like to be able to automatically create a report or index based on Categories and Tags. This would allow for a quick "cheat sheet" overview.

1) Define table search parameters -- i.e., City Tag: San Francisco to select all information in RW that has a City Tag equal to San Francisco.

2) Create a table with Tag headers -- i.e., Name, Occupation, Level, Primary Location.

3) Table with links is created by RW and displayed as a snippet.

I'm torn as to whether I'd want it to update automatically or if it should become a static table that can be manually edited/annotated.

Click to expand...

The first item is quite different from the other two. The first one would involve creating a filter on the desired tag and saving it as a named filter that you can instantly reuse. All the underpinnings for this are in place, but we haven't had the time to implement it yet. This will be on the upcoming survey.

The second item would be somewhat complicated to do. Every snippet is completely independent of the type definition upon which it is based. Yes, everything can be connected up appropriately, but there are a bunch of intermediate tables involved, so it would involve a good amount of work to sort out properly across all the different situations that could arise. However, it's definitely doable. I'll add it to the survey for users to weigh in on how important this would be to them.

The third item sounds like a poor approach to me, but the general idea seems solid. Your content (and world) will be evolving over time. The only way a snippet could be updated would be when you explicitly trigger it. And it doesn't really make sense to me that a snippet would be used for this purpose. Snippets are always within the context of a given topic, but this query/report is intentionally something that spans across your entire content. What I think would be better is to have a separate view of your content that takes a holistic view, which might entail adding a new button on the ribbon bar for a completely different purpose. You could then define these "views" into your data and access them at any time, getting up-to-date "reports" whenever you access them.

With the above approach, it also obviates the question of whether to auto-generate or manually edit the views. They would always be auto-generated whenever you wanted to view them.

What do you think?

It's promising that it's doable and useful. Lots of things I'd put ahead. And again, sorry for my fumbling descriptions of desired functionality. You've got an uncanny knack for ferreting out my intent for whatever that is worth.

The thing that triggered this was assembling a table of NPCs for a city. I have topics for the main folks and the rest are embedded in their businesses. The table lists every single one of them and their location(s) as a reference and I like that I can easily see which ones have links (and thus more info) and those that are static (meaning they are most likely bit players that may float up in importance but aren't worth fleshing out now).

I was hoping that someday I could search for a field and find all the bit players which I could then search on to find the NPC I wanted even though it didn't have a topic.

I was hoping that someday I could quickly assemble a table of NPCs with proximity so I could have them all interact with the players rather than move topic-by-topic without the context of the bigger picture.

Here's another trick in the short-term that you might try. Define a Utility tag of "Embedded NPC" or something similar that works for you. Then assign that tag to each of the business where you have an embedded NPC. Now you can do a quick filter on that one tag and you've got all those topics instantly culled out for review.

Another trick is to assign an alias to each business with the name of the embedded NPC within it. If you know the same of the NPC, you can quickly find the business. And you can also see the NPC in the navigation pane (if you show aliases), plus you can even link to it within the business (via the alias).

Thanks for the compliment on distilling out what you're really striving for. It's a skill I've really worked on over the years. It's nice to know that it's paying off.

Hmmm, aliases.... Clever use of them. And hidden from view when you don't want the clutter. I've got my Master Table for now but that suggestion is intriguing because it gets them linked.

rob said:

With the above approach, it also obviates the question of whether to auto-generate or manually edit the views. They would always be auto-generated whenever you wanted to view them.

What do you think?

Click to expand...

+1 and can see various applications for this approach.

rob said:

The third item sounds like a poor approach to me, but the general idea seems solid. Your content (and world) will be evolving over time. The only way a snippet could be updated would be when you explicitly trigger it. And it doesn't really make sense to me that a snippet would be used for this purpose. Snippets are always within the context of a given topic, but this query/report is intentionally something that spans across your entire content. What I think would be better is to have a separate view of your content that takes a holistic view, which might entail adding a new button on the ribbon bar for a completely different purpose. You could then define these "views" into your data and access them at any time, getting up-to-date "reports" whenever you access them.

Click to expand...

Would players be able to access these "reports" as well? I'm thinking that I would use them primarily for NPC listings - all NPCs in a guild or cult. Ideally I'd include the list in the topic itself - have a snippet? If I have the term right? Listing membership.

If you use relationships you see the other topics with all members on the right side with a fitting symbol.

Ah, awesome I don't actually have a copy of the software yet combination of still learning Hero Lab and no room in the budget right now.

I was thinking more along the lines of having tables that would be associated to a Category. Each table would have selectable columns that would equate to a snippet in that topic The rows would then be the topics data. They could be filtered by keywords or field data.

rob said:

Here's another trick in the short-term that you might try. Define a Utility tag of "Embedded NPC" or something similar that works for you. Then assign that tag to each of the business where you have an embedded NPC. Now you can do a quick filter on that one tag and you've got all those topics instantly culled out for review.

Another trick is to assign an alias to each business with the name of the embedded NPC within it. If you know the same of the NPC, you can quickly find the business. And you can also see the NPC in the navigation pane (if you show aliases), plus you can even link to it within the business (via the alias).

Thanks for the compliment on distilling out what you're really striving for. It's a skill I've really worked on over the years. It's nice to know that it's paying off.

Click to expand...

That's pretty interesting. I'll have to try to remember that one. Thanks Rob.

I think I'm going to incorporate Rob's alias for NPC suggestion. It's clean, linkable and I can hide the clutter. The linkable piece is the part I particularly like.

I've already developed a concise master summary list for each area/city/dungeon which is what I'd like to see RW create automatically eventually. I like the summary view to quickly see context and breadth.

I've broken NPCs down to "major" that are fleshed out, "minor" that are likely for the players to interact with or whom I can easily expand upon for adventure links and "mention" which are the red shirts...err...just a line of text somewhere.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B38xJJAsUPYUMlJ6T3I5RC1hT00/view?usp=sharing