Re: commit: abi (BOTH): mail merge stuff and a CocoaAbi toolbars fix

Hi Dom,

I'm not worried about that. I think I confused you a little. What I
meant is that the list of field names in the dialog isn't always
correct.

I'm just considering the (vanishingly rare?) case where you are editing
two (or more) documents but are wanting to use different data sources
(e.g., .csv) with the two documents.

Ideally the modeless dialog should query the current document, asking
for the named fields based on the document's associated data source.

Finally, it wouldn't hurt to save the associated data source filename
(in the AbiWord document's meta data, perhaps?) so that you don't have
to explicitly re-import the data source the next time you edit the
file.

I'm not trying to change the current behaviour, merely improve it... :-)

Ciao, Frank

On 23 Jan 2005, at 15:14, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
>> "Mail merge fields are, naturally, saved and loaded,
>> but the
>> Insert->Mail Merge Field... dialog doesn't reflect
>> the current
>> document's fields but rather some internal set of
>> fields, which is
>> confusing if you are trying to work with muliple
>> mail merge sources."
>
> I find any other behavior to be confusing. The purpose
> of the dialog is to insert new, named fields into the
> dialog based on some reference set with which you'll
> be merging. Let's say that you create a 1000 line long
> CSV from a database dump. Its first line is the column
> names:
>
> first_name,last_name,address,telephone
> dom,lachowicz,boston,...
> frank,franklin,newcastle,...
>
> You'll want to insert the column names as fields into
> the document.
>
> Hope that explains things a bit.
>
> Best,
> Dom
>
>
>
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Received on Sun Jan 23 16:41:16 2005