Question

Apppreciate any guidance on the scenario below...

Example if each Topic was a process and each process has associated tools with it.... guessing this would be a section in the process with a list of the tools applicable to the process

and subsequently...

If I wanted to produce a dynamic list of tools in a topic and what processes these were used in.... with hyperlinks to the processes...

Question... what is the best textual format to enter the tools within the process and how would I go about producing a topic which could report a list of the tools by process.

thanks...

Environment

-- TWikiGuest - 15 Jun 2007

Answer

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have I provided enough info for this question to be understandable?

-- TWikiGuest - 20 Jun 2007

Well, there's not enough to suggest a solution, but I can suggest a couple of pointers.

Roughly said, it is a trade-off: The more formalized you write your data when creating the process topics, the easier the retrieval for the report. On the other hand, you write the report creation just once, so leaving more freedom when entering the topic and tools may eventually pay off.

Have a look at VarSEARCH, FormattedSearch, and TWikiForms for a start.

• %SEARCH{...}% would be the basic thing behind the dynamic list of tools. It understands regular expressions, so it can do really complicated things like spot your tools in a TWiki table (it operates on the text you enter in the topics and not on the HTML generated).
• FormattedSearch gives help how to present the search results. You can have nested searches - there is an example in the page.
• TWikiForms are a more formalized way of input. There's a nice, albeit complex example for a dynamic display of form searches at SearchBookTitles. Searches for formfields are faster, which may become important for many (more than, say, 1000) topics.
• TWikiVariables is a topic which is based on a %SEARCH{...}% - it relies on the fact that the topic names of all variables start with Var. Introducing conventions like that when introducing a dynamic report generation is much easier than bolting it on later, but again it is a trade-off between freedom of topic authors and ease of report generation.

Make your choice depending on the number and skill of your topic authors, the skill of the power user who maintains the search description in the report, and the number of processes and tools you expect. The people who will use the wiki will provide more insight than we can.

-- HaraldJoerg - 20 Jun 2007

Thanks

-- TWikiGuest - 06 Jul 2007