Hi all,
I try to figure out since some weeks now if Tropy could fit into my project. As a complete newbie in metadata and database creation, I discovered, with Tropy, such stuff as “csv”, “dublin core”, “vocabulary”… This is my first experience to create some kind of database. So it’s a bit hard for me at the moment to really understand how all of this work. I hope my question will not appear to odd to all of you, since I may use it completely wrong.
Because of the very special and unique features of the metadata I want to embed (no existing vocabulary), I assume that the best way to have these metadata is to use the tags. So I try with such kind of different tags, which could be named as, for exemple :
A1, A2, A3 (each one in red color)
B1, B2, B3, B4, B5 (each one in green color)
C1, C2 (each one in blue color)
D1, D2, D3, D4, D5, D6 (each one in silver color)
E1, E2, E3 (each one in yellow color)
The letters here stand for some kind of “property” of a given item, and then another keyword (here a number) is added to mark more precisely this item.
Every item is attached to each letter. For exemple :
item1 : A3, B2, C1, D4, E1
item2 : A1, B3, C2, D4, E2
item3 : A2, B2, C3, D6, E1
When I export to CSV, my point is to obtain a column for A, one another for B, one another for C, etc… But when you do the export and open it in Libreoffice, all the tags are in the same column, which I think is quite normal and could be not problematic. All the tags are in the very same column, and all the tags are separated by a comma. In Libreoffice, when you use this kind of tool to separate the texts into separate columns, it didn’t give the expected result, because the tags in this column of Libreoffice doesn’t appear in the alphabetical order. It gives something like this :
item1 : B2, A3, C1, D4, E1
item2 : C2, B3, D4, E2, A1
item3 : B2, A2, D6, E1, C3
So when I use this “text to colmuns tool” of Libreoffice, it gives me five different columns, with only one tag in each, but with all kind of letters for a specific newly created columns. If during the export to csv from Tropy, the tags could be arranged in alphabetical order, it will solve the problem I think.
As I see, the order provided by Tropy during an export to csv for the tags, correspond to the order of the colour which could be seen at the bottom right of each item (from left to right) in the Tropy’s main view. I guess it’s the order corresponding to the order I attribute the item to a given tag, from a chronological point of view.
Do you know any tips in order to ask to the csv plugin to put the tags in the alphabetical order during a csv export, and not from the chronological order in which I added the tags ?
I hope sincerely that my question is quite understandable and not completely out of any intellectual reach.
I really appreciate this software and hope it would be useful for my research in the months and years to come.
Thanks to all of you.
Baptiste