Specifying a position for an object within a Connect box

OL Connect Professional Designer
1

Hello. I’m new to PlanetPress Connect, and am seeking to duplicate some of the functionality within PlanetPress 7 Presstalk within Connect. With Presstalk, one could use the code to analyze data, and specify a certain position within the Presstalk object to display text. Is this functionality present within Connect?

For example, I have a script that starts a repeat loop. It looks at the contents of field X. If the field contents match a particular value, it places an “X” in a certain position. It then moves the cursor 0.4 inches to the right, increments a counter integer by 1, looks at field X +1, and performs the same test. It stops when the counter reaches a certain threshold.

The number of possible positions are quite large for this approach. I’m not yet seeing (I hope I’m not missing something obvious) the ability to combine the analytical/decision making abilities of a programming language with the ability to precisely place output. If the number of possible positions approached several dozen, I’d hate to have to create several dozen objects, position each one, the create conditionals to show or hide output (when I could do the same thing with a few lines of code.

Thanks in advance!

Dan

2

Dan,

You can’t see the ability to combine analysis of the source file and decision making in the output because it doesn’t exist. The whole point of doing Data Mapping and Designing in different modules is to separate these concerns altogether, and permanently.

Now, without knowing the exact data and concerns I can’t really give you a precise answer on how this can be done. However, it does sound like you could detect the position if your specific data in your Data Mapping Configuration (this might require a bit of scripting for each data point you’re looking at, or maybe within a loop or something). Note that Connect 1.3 has a new option in the DataMapper module called “Maximum iterations on each line” which lets you actually run that loop on the same line without the fear of causing an infinite loop.

As for the Designer part of it, you don’t really need many objects, you could simply use a script that loops through each of those values in your data model and programatically generate the elements as you go through each of them.

Hope this helps!
~Evie