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Two questions

A topic by CodeMonki created 60 days ago Views: 87 Replies: 5
Viewing posts 1 to 2
(+1)

Greetings!

I just set up Decker and I’m excited about building apps with it. I shared the link to the Github repo with a couple of friends and they said they’ll look at it over the weekend, but their first glance at Decker prompted two questions from them:

  1. Can cards have a colored background?
  2. Can you integrate Decker with SQLite?

I told them I’d find out and get back to them. I suspect the answer to both questions is no because I don’t recall the original MacIntosh having a color screen and for the Decker “decks” to be portable and self-contained, especially for the web, integrating to SQLite is not available.

I am open to correction on both. :-)

One thing I am uncertain on is how much data can be stored in the grid because I don’t recally seeing anything that mentions that.

Developer

While Decker's UI is primarily black and white, internally it uses a 16-color palette. You can draw with any of these colors on a card background by switching to "color mode" (Style -> Color). The palette is customizable, and there has been some previous discussion about importing color images.

Decks are, in a real sense, databases already, with grid widgets serving as reified tables and Lil offering a SQL-ish query language. There are no hard limits to the quantity of data which can be stored in a grid widget; tens of thousands of rows and a few dozen columns should be no trouble at all. With a huge dataset your mileage may vary, but you can always give it a shot.

Decker does not directly integrate with SQLite, but there are a few options. If you simply want to synchronize the contents of a deck with a SQLite database, you could use a Lilt script to automate exporting information from a deck or importing data and programmatically building a deck from it. If you're comfortable building Decker from source you could alternatively use The Danger Zone to communicate with other software live.

Decker can readily work with a variety of common data interchange formats like CSV, JSON, or XML, and it does have facilities for parsing binary formats.  There aren't currently any libraries for working with SQLite's database format, but it would certainly be possible for a sufficiently motivated individual to write one in Lil.

(+1)

Cool, I’ll let them know!

One other question. If I set up a Decker app as a web app, I am assuming I can host it on my website (still reading the docs so I’m not clear on that yet). With that being the case, if I need to load an external data file may I assume that I can still do that since the data file would be local to the web server?

Developer

Decker's web exports are self-contained monolithic .html files, with no required "server-side" component; they can be served statically as part of any web page. Web-Decker strictly executes on the viewer's web browser. It is possible for scripts to prompt users to select and open files from their local filesystem, but there is no mechanism for referencing or fetching external files automatically, irrespective of where the deck is stored. In general, if a deck needs data, the data should be embedded in the deck.

(+1)

Ok, so no fetching a file from the server then. Got it.