InfoQube IM - Community

Submitted by Paul_J_Miller on 2018/05/25 17:07

The current import options of InfoQube are EccoPro, Evernote, Heirarchical data and Non Heirarchical Data. Very good, but if you don't use Evernote and have nerer used EccoPro you are down to Hierarchical and Non Hierarcical import. Hierarchical is something like an outline from MS Word which is also OK. Non Hierarchical is something like a .CSV file.

I think something simpler is also needed.

I have many little bits of information in text files on my disk. I think there may be some other people who have disparate pieces of information scattered about in text files, .RTF files, HTML files, .EML files, etc..

I often loose track of where they are and end up in the situation of "I know I had that in a file somewhere but where did I put it?"

Obviously the best place for something like this is in InfoQube as an item with tags and a place in one or more hierarchies, but the only option at the moment is to copy an paste each individual file. This is OK for a few files but if there are many it can become quite tiresome.

If I drag and drop a list of files from explorer and drop them in a grid then for each file in the list it creates an item which is a link to the file on disk. Which is not what I wanted.

It would be nice if there could be an option to copy (drag and drop) the file list into InfoQube. Or an import option which brought up a file selector dialog.

If for each file in the list it would create an item with the file name as the name of the item (without the extension) and the body of the file copied to the HTML pane. Of course this could only work for certain types of file :-

.TXT
.EML
.HTM or .HTML
.RTF
.MHT

However these types would cover almost all of my needs.

Once they are in InfoQube with the file name as the name of the item and the body of the file in the HTML pane then I can get to work adding tags and meta-data.

Comments

Paul, would the contents of the external file be "copied" into an IQ item, so that there would be two versions of the copied contents (in external file, and in IQ item), or would IQ simply be displaying the contents of the external file in the HTML pane? As it is right now the HTML pane does display the contents of different types of external files - the path to the file is stored in the ItemHTMLFile field. If you have two copies of the same contents (external file, and IQ item), then you might want to have them synchronized, or perhaps not in some cases.

It may be possible already, but I'd also like to give IQ a list of files (from scattered portions of the file system), and have IQ create new items for each file. IQ would automatically populate IQ fields with metadata about those files, as much as possible. And then we could add additional IQ fields to these items, as a supplemental file metadata system.

We do already have the EmailToIQ method of getting external data into IQ. I'd also like to see IQ monitor the contents of a folder, perhaps a Dropbox folder, and automatically import the files in the folder, perhaps in the same way that EmailToIQ works.

The way I thought it should work is nice and simple, the contents of the file are copied into the HTML pane of the item. There is no synchronisation, this is just putting the information in the file into InfoQube.

It might be possible for InfoQube to populate some of the field values.

Synchronisation might turn out to be a can of worms. If you copied hundreds of files this way then InfoQube would have to maintain a huge list of file locations. What happens when one of the external files is moved or deleted? Do we keep putting the file back in its original location?

At the moment on a drag and drop from Windows Explorer IQ just creates a list of items (1 per file) whose name is a link to the file. I just thought it would be better to copy the files into IQ or have an option which sets the behaviour to eihter copy or link.

Paul, when you drag and drop files from Windows Explorer into IQ, are you seeing this dialog box? (If not, try holding down Ctrl key when you drag and drop.) I dragged and dropped a bunch of HTML files into IQ, and this is the dialog I saw Notice the File Saved In HTML Pane option. IQ created a new item for every file that I dropped into IQ For each item, the name of the file is put into the Item field, and the path to the file is stored in the ItemHTMLFile field. When you click on any of these items, the body of the HTML file appears in the HTML pane. Maybe this will accomplish a lot of what you want? More details here - www.sqlnotes.net/drupal5/index.php

Yes that is the dialog box I see and I must have missed the 'File saved in' part. Doh ...

It was greyed out when I tried but I now notice that if you click on 'No Hyperlink' it is ungreyed.

Yes this will achieve what I wanted to do.

Thank you.

It does indeed work, the text files are imported into the grid. The file extension is added to each filename which is a bit annoying but this is just a minor problem.

The major problem which is unrelated to the subject of this post is that a plain text file is inserted into the grid with no word wrap therefore creating very long lines, if I type text into normal HTMP pane then it wraps at the right edge of the pane. However if I type text into one of the imported documents HTML panes then the whole pane scrolls sideways when I reach the right hand edge. It also seems that the line spacing has been set to 1.5 lines.

Is there a command hidden somewhere to remove all formatting and just to retain the plain text?

If I view the HTML code then there are three lines as :-

Then the fourth line starts off with :-

And then has the entire imported file (tens of kilobytes) on that one single line.

Paul, there is a template file for the HTML pane for all (new?) HTML content.

I have no idea if one could modify it to cover this situation.

See Default template for HTML and MHT documents: in 4. Document Pane for more info

[quote=Paul_J_Miller]Synchronisation might turn out to be a can of worms. If you copied hundreds of files this way then InfoQube would have to maintain a huge list of file locations. What happens when one of the external files is moved or deleted? Do we keep putting the file back in its original location?
[/quote]

Just a related note -- in the dialogue as shown above,

if you select

Link should point to: Shortcut to the file

a shortcut is saved in the IQ file folder -- shortcuts appear to be quite intelligent i.e. if a file is moved, the file can still be found and opened by the same shortcut. (I think this some NTFS capability). I remember checking it in IQ, and it worked (but haven't really tested it properly).

Let's see: Link to Files, Folders and URLs says:

Shortcut to the file: a shortcut to the file will be created and saved in the .Files folder (yourfilename].SNDB.Files)
This second option has the advantage that the file will be found even if it is moved (within the same partition)

A plain text document type is coming soon, it's been on my to-do list for far too long

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

[quote=Pierre_Admin]

A plain text document type is coming soon, it's been on my to-do list for far too long

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

[/quote]

HTML format is enough, I just need to know how to remove the formatting from a plain text file copied into IQ and how to enable word wrap.