note files

[Word of Mouth Productions]

Ok, no NASA jokes,

I am creating a note base to work with a slide show. Each slide will have a
note associated with it that is either blank or filled by the user. I would
guess there would be no more than 50 notes that each of which might contain
100 or more words.

Would the best way to handle this be to read from the text file that
contains the notes each time the user turns to another note or to read the
text file in at the beginning of the session and just refer to the text
variable each time another note is needed?

Notes will also be edited and will have to be saved again. This can be done
in the text variable or can be done by writing to a text file each time.

I suppose the answer to this question depends on the size limit of a
variable in Director. By the way, I'm using simple ascii text from fields,
not RTF or other text from text members.

Since each note is associated with a slide, I was thinking of tagging each
note with the slide name and loading it all into a property list on start up
to make referencing the text easier.

Comments, answers?



--
Craig Wollman
Word of Mouth Productions
phone 212 724 8302
fax 212 724 8151
[url]www.wordofmouthpros.com[/url]

[JB]

if notes are stored on a single user system, you could use a separate
savepref, getpref file for each note, this is the simplest way to store
text.

One common notes file could be used, this is more suitable for multiple
user systems, with logged in user name used for notes file name.

You would invent some delimiter scheme to seperate notes with the common
file, such as

///note12

with /// excluded from body of notes.


alternative, an entire list variable may be stored in text file.

the trick here is to restore the list from the tedt file using
value(readText), validating list with not voidp() or listp() test of
result.