Hello! (and <image> tag/string question)

Thu May 14 10:35:30 BST 2020

Hello again,

Your tip about changing how photos are stored made all the difference in the world!  I was able to complete my project with just one path change to my xsl file.  Thanks for the help!  My code and methods are ugly, but with your help, I’ve achieved the results I wanted.

Would it normally be easy to take an existing project like mine (for display in a web browser) and adjust it to display inside tellico’s “generate report” window?  I’m curious whether I should work towards the goal of creating an actual report-template, or whether I should stick with the solution I have until I’ve learned more.

Basically, what I have now is the full tellico.tc XML file with the following three modifications made to it: 
1. After the <!DOCTYPE ... > declaration, I added the following line:
<?xml-stylesheet type=”text/xsl” href=”nameofmy.xsl”?> 

2. I deleted everything after the word “tellico” in the tellico tag (for some reason, things wouldn’t work with xmlns="http://periapsis.org/tellico/" syntaxVersion="11"> in it.  Is that the “namespace” entry?   Why would it run without that, but not with?)
3. I also had to find/replace a few html tags I had in the text entry fields of my collection

Those are the only changes I made to the XML...so the entire XML file just sits there - mostly unmodified.  Then the xsl stylesheet applies the style and selects which entries are display in what layout in the web browser.  Like I said - it might be an ugly way to get there, but it does what I need it to do for this specific project.

I understand that this isn’t a xsl/xml 101 course, so please excuse any questions which are out of line for this mailing list.  I’d enjoy learning how to properly make templates to use in Tellico, and would appreciate any suggestions to specific resources which could help me obtain that goal the quickest.  I did just discover the xsl portion of the w3.org website, so I’ll start there.

Is there a way to search the mailing list’s archive?

Thanks again,
Fuzzy

From: Robby Stephenson [mailto:robby at periapsis.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2020 6:38 PM
To: Fuzzy
Cc: Tellico
Subject: Re: Hello! (and <image> tag/string question)

Hi!

On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 6:30 PM Fuzzy <tuser at fuzzyjazz.com> wrote:

I just joined the list, so please forgive any breach in protocol.  

First...thanks for Tellico.  I love it.

Thanks! Glad you like it. No protocol here, happy to help anyone who's using Tellico.

The first thing I realized was: Tellico files aren’t SQL database files.  Then I realized they are basically XML files (correct me if I’ve missed any nuance here...I really don’t know what I’m doing).

Yes, they're XML files, usually zipped, though they don't have to be. You can use the Export menu to get them as a .zip file with the images included.

Well, after spending a full 24 hours learning about xml and xsl, I finally was able to successfully port the data I wanted from my tellico.tc file into the format I wanted...all except the “image” data.  (In this case the CD cover is contained within the .tc/xml file as a string?)  I haven’t been able to figure out how to turn that string back into an image (I’m simply trying to have xsl export the image as an url(“background.jpeg”) type of thing into my formatted output.)  xsl correctly grabs the proper “whateverrandomcharacters.jpeg” filename, but I don’t know how to convert the actual image string back into a jpeg.  

Depending on your settings within the app, the images can either be saved within the XML file, as base64 encoded data (which isn't recommended since it makes the files rather large), as image files in the same directory as the .tc file (_files used for the directory name) or in a common directory in the user's folder.  For the latter, the location is likely to be $HOME/.local/share/tellico/data/ and the image filename is what it is in the Tellico file. So just concatenate the file path with the image name.

Depending on your workflow, you can use unzip and xsltproc to automate things. A few past discussions might be helpful:

https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=200 <https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=200&t=137533> &t=137533

https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/tellico-users/2018-October/001402.html

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Robby

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/tellico-users/attachments/20200514/d12e240a/attachment-0001.htm>