How can i display the Attribute like "Lineage" in attributes pane

[slangmgh]

Some attributes like "Lineage", "Indent Level" seems cannot be add to attributes pane, is there any way i can do it, thanks.

[armsys]

Originally posted by slangmgh
Some attributes like "Lineage", "Indent Level" seems cannot be add to attributes pane, is there any way i can do it, thanks.
Where do you find these attributes being exposed in UR?
Are these rich text attributes?
Armstrong

[slangmgh]

Originally posted by armsys
Where do you find these attributes being exposed in UR?
Are these rich text attributes?
Armstrong

These is virtual system attributes, you can find them in Tools/Attributes menu. http://www.kinook.com/UltraRecall/Manual/index.htm?virtualattributes.htm

[kinook]

Originally posted by slangmgh
Some attributes like "Lineage", "Indent Level" seems cannot be add to attributes pane, is there any way i can do it, thanks. No, since the Item Attributes pane shows attributes for the item itself, and those attributes are specific to a particular link (and the selection may be for an item itself and not a particular link).

[schferk]

I've been trying to display such a virtual attribute, the indent level, anywhere, for the last two hours (including searching the "help" file and this forum, as usual).

I need that in order to write a program that would "read" the indent level of every given entry in the tree, in order to build up that same tree within another outliner (but without import functions), e.g. ActionOutline, whose better printing function would then allow me to print my UR stuff as I like it to be printed.

So please can you tell me WHERE such a virtual attribute IS / CAN BE displayed, in any fetchable way (= "select field xyz, control-c" or something), since that should be possible, in any way : Would those virtual attributes (= calculated on the spot) be totally invisible, why would they exist in the very first place (= in the "help" file and in this forum's discussion I mean, and not only internally, without being speaken here and there of) ? IF there ain't indeed accessible but by the search function, is it imaginable to search for every item in the tree, then to display all results (e.g. 813 for 813 items in the tree) in tree order (!), and an external program would then "read" those indent level indications from the search results list, one by one, to fill up its array positions accordingly ? Could this be possible, at least, or is there any simpler way of doing such a one-by-one read of those values ? By exporting a list perhaps ? Anyway, displaying such values on-screen upon request should be possible without searching / exporting, and possibly is, without my having discovered it ?

Again, it's the very basic functions of UR - here : an attribute which is there, but which I can't get access to - that make me endlessly turn around, so much for the "help" file, again. BTW, even in the status line (from which it wouldn't be "fetchable"), I cannot display that attribute "indent level". And I know there's "View - Choose Columns", and "Tools - Attributes", and "Tools - Options - Attributes", nothing helps. Generally speaking, if UR did a complete rehaul of its attributes management (understood at this point in time by perhaps 15 p.c. of its users, I (perhaps erroneously) think), UR's overall accessibility to new prospective users would be easily doubled if not tripled just by that.

Thanks for your help.

[$bill]

You can display the attribute 'Indent Level' in the Child Items window by right clicking on the headers and then more to display the Choose Columns box.

Edit- The View | Choose Columns seem to work for me too as does exporting items with the attribute "Indent Level".

[schferk]

Thank you and please help anew !

Thank you very much, I had done a lot of clicking and right-clicking thruout the screen, but must have overlooked that right-click menu entry indeed, it works fine up to a point.

That point is, how to do a tree order sorting of all those entries then in the related items pane ? I check "indent level" and "tree order", and I sort by tree order, and then I do NOT get a list sorted by tree order, but MANY an entry get the SAME "tree order" number, many "0", then many "1", then many "2", and so on, within the field "tree order", and with each "tree order" number group, the alphabetical sorting by title begins anew, whilst I need that long list as in the tree, just with added indent numbers.

And I do NOT understand, of course, why the "tree order" attribute has many 0...5 values, in order to have, e.g. 813 single values going from 1 to 813 ; and these values between 0 and 5 are NOT identical with those in the "indent level" attribute of each item, I checked.

You belong, by all evidence, to that 15 p.c. group of UR users having understood its attributes' management, I'll never do, for me it's a black box (and those weird "tree order" values above are a perfect example for UR's being such a black box, without possibility of natural understanding). With a lot of difficulty, I use some function, then I don't need it for 6 months, then again I need to use it, and I start from scratch, total absence of intuitiveness making me a sheer beginner again, and without helping help file entries : That's devastating.

Thus, please answer my follow-up question as well : How to have the tree entries, in the related items field, in real tree order ?

I knew this, as even the answer to my first question, months ago, and as to the solution, I'm as disarmed as I'm for that now.

To speak frankly, it's not only for printing issues that I'd like to try to build such an "exit program", it's also because I'm seriously considering leaving, which, as I know, would please a lot of people here who then wouldn't be bothered again, like I didn't bother people anymore in the outlinersoftware and the mybase or what was it called again forums after leaving.

I simply DO NOT UNDERSTAND UR's architecture, not today, and not more than a year ago, and having discovered, far too late, the possibility of "opening" / loading a ROW of files in ANY given program, by "open..." and then ""a.yz" "b.yz" "c.yz" Enter"

- I simply hadn't been aware of this super-simple device giving anybody every means, in any given program, to do some sort of project management by simply storing such "command lines" anywhere, be it in the program itself, be it anywhere else, and to activate them by a most simple macro, and given the condition he's got cut up his stuff into a sufficiently large number of files so that their different combinations make any sense, giving quite different workspaces indeed -,

if I had known that procedure, I'd never had left AO for MyBase or what was it called again, no, MyInfo, voilÃ*, and then for UR : it's paradoxical, I had 150 files in AO then, I have 150 files in UR now, so why not going back to AO where my work had been so much more fluid than it's in UR, with every single item being in need of being backed up / processed after even the most minor changes to it...

And given that indeed, I do NOT use UR's most brilliant feature, cloning - by fear of not being able to leave perhaps, as I have got MyInfo files left where I made the mistake of using its grid feature... multiplicating UR files instead so that "standards" are indeed available to me where I need them...

Zargron said, here in this forum, back in 2007 :

"All I can suggest to you and others is that you assume UR is based on high quality software design principles. Basically this means you assume it is very modularised with minimal dependency between each module. For example, assume that each pane is a separate object that has a carefully crafted low dependency on any other pane. Assume each toolbar has little or no dependency on any other toolbar. Assume importing and exporting has “no� dependency on printing and visa versa. If would be nice, (but very rarely happens), if the software vendor conveys dependency problems when responding to suggestions."

I'm sure he's right, but then, his remark does NOT help me to understand why in such a fine program, when you look at a "tree order" value, you get multiple 0/1/2... instead of a row between 1 and the number of items the tree has.

COPING with this program of supreme opaqueness is far too demanding, I'd prefer going back to a very simple but really intuitive program where WORKING with the program is easy, even for dumbos like me.

So, please help me with leaving, in telling me how such a tree order in the related items pane can be obtained. I knew it once, I've simply forgotten, and UR isn't a program that allows for forgetting ways of doing things, that's why I can't barely bear it anymore.

[schferk]

I'd thought it to be rather GOOD news that I'm considering leaving !?

Some explanation of that weird phenomenon (weird to me, perhaps perfectly senseful indeed) in the related items pane would be very helpful for understanding even without helping me to have the list there I want.

And finally, that list I want must be most easy to obtain, but how ?

And I promise to publish the program here when it'll work, or to NOT publish it here, depending on Kinook's preference. ;-)

[schferk]

How to export UR items / subtrees into ActionOutline
(May it be for better printing or better exporting.)

(Understood that AO has NO importing feature BUT allows for importing tab-indented (don't try with spaces) tree importing into its tree (which can also consist of just the root item of course).)

1)

Select root item of tree (or parent item of subtree you want to export)
Do Tree-Expand all.
Do File-Export and there csv with title and indent level, then check child items/recursive.
You'll get a list in the format

"first item",1
"second of your items",2

with perhaps thousands of entries.

2)

Open that list with a programmable text editor, e.g. TSE. Run a macro on the file, in TSE it would be the following macro :

proc main()
string urlevel[1] //1-digit
integer aolevel = 0

begfile()
lreplace('"','','gn^') //g=whole text, n=no confirmation, ^=beginning of line
begfile()

nextline:
endline()
left()
urlevel = chr(currchar()) //gets the 1-digit number at last position of line
aolevel = val(urlevel) //as you see, TSE's variables are typed
begline()

do aolevel times
inserttext('£') //direct insertion of tab doesn't work ; English must use another special char
enddo


if down() //means : if down is possible, and goes down then
goto nextline //= to the label called nextline, and don't say goto is bad style even if used with caution
endif
//else :

begfile()
lreplace(',[0-9]','','gn$x') //$=end of line, x=regex
lreplace('"','','gn$') //in 2 steps since 1-word titles in UR are NOT within ""...
lreplace('£','\t','gnx') //from £ to tab, regex in search/replace only, not in inserttext...

begfile()
msgbox('DONE') //not really necessary in a program like TSE that processes, on a slow comp, 10,000 such items within a second
end

3)

Here or then in AO, you could manually check for (double) "" since my macro does not take into account cases in which you had included some titles or words within titles within "" ; you can refine the macro for that, of course. The same goes for any 2-digit indent levels, of course.

4)

Do control-a, control-c, then in AO's tree control-v (Exclude the UR tree root element from your tree you're going to paste under AO's root element though) : You've got a perfect double of your UR tree in AO. Expand that AO tree as well and go, in each tree, to the root item. (Make a double of your AO file in case your macro's going to demolish your original AO file.)

5)

Then, put a macro program / script program onto both programs, going back and forth in both programs between tree and text pane, and between the progs. This is so basic I won't dare presenting a script for this but beware of response times, allow for generous macro pauses / delays after your clipboard commands, if you have longer text items and / or items with pictures, allow for 5 sec or more after those commands if you don't want to restart again and again after your macro running amok in various places.

Make sure you insert a backspace after each pasting, since AO inserts an unwanted blank end line ; run the macro on your second comp, day and night, since it'll only process 200-250 items per hour ; AO is so stable that you it'll be sufficient to have the macro save your AO file every new 500 items or so; if you want to be sure, export both the UR and the AO trees, with contents, into text files you then compare with BeyondCompare or whatever ; only work on copies of your UR files but compare with the originals ; you can combine various UR files into a big one, then taking advantage, after export, of AO's command "save this subtree as a new file" for breaking the files up again.


P.S. The tree position attribute restarts with 0/1 on every subtree, there doesn't seem to be an overall such attribute, i.e. "this item is the xth of / line x in the tree as a whole". (There's File - Properties - Items, of course... and which is not reliable. If you select your tree items manually, by shift-down, you'll get the real items number of your tree, which is also taken into account when exporting your tree (incl. templates, recycle bin, inbox, etc. if you selected them) - the item count in File - Properties indicates some 10 items more than that - as said before, UR's a black box for me I don't understand since it almost never behaves as you'd expect.)

[schferk]

See my thread regarding the unreliability of UR's export.