Decker

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Personal Databases

A topic by RMartin52 created Apr 29, 2024 Views: 179 Replies: 2

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RMartin52204 days ago(+1)

Hello!

I'm just looking into Decker and playing with the demo and reading some of the documentation. The idea of using it for personal databases intrigues me. However, I can't figure out how one would go about having the same fields and layout on multiple cards. Like, in Hypercard, you could add widgets that you wanted to appear on every new card in a stack to the background of the card. Is there a similar concept in Decker? Or, would I need to create a template card that doesn't get edited and then write a script to duplicate the template card whenever I wanted a new card with the labels and fields ready for editing?

Thanks in advance for any helpful answers.

Internet JanitorDeveloper204 days ago

Decker's equivalent to HyperCard's "backgrounds" is Contraptions; a Contraption instance can be the size of an entire card, if you like, or you could compose forms from several contraptions.

Duplicating template cards with deck.copy[] and deck.paste[] is also a valid approach. This might be desirable if you want to start with a template and then customize each instance beyond just the data they contain.

Another approach entirely would be to use a few Grid widgets to store tabular data in one place, instead of spreading it across many cards. See the CRUD demo for a simple example of this pattern. Storing data in grids makes it much easier to use Lil's query language to manipulate it.

Does any of that point you in the right direction?

RMartin52204 days ago

Thank you!

I think that is all good info. I will need to look more at Contraptions. I did go and look at the CRUD demo and that looks promising as well.

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Decker

Personal Databases