This may be a long-shot, maybe aspirational question/request.
For many of my books, I have Library of Congress card-catalogue call# info (a call# field) in an older FileMaker database (I lived in FM for many years before finding TW, and still use it for certain workflows). I have managed to develop a workable JSON-generating (bibtex-style) export process that can help get these biblio records across from FileMaker into TiddlyWiki. Mostly good.
Alas, variant tiddler versions of many of those same records already exist in my TiddlyWiki (where I’ve been building a set of bibtex records for use with solutions by @Mohammad), and these tiddlers include data for fields (image-url, notes, tags, etc.) that are not present in my FileMaker records.
Within FileMaker’s own import process, problems like these are relatively easy to solve: given an incoming duplicate (based on a “match” field), the import dialogue allows one to leave various existing fields untouched, and simply to add the content of desired fields. This is fantastic database behavior… Alas, FileMaker doesn’t directly import JSON. So I can’t simply accomplish this merging of fields on the FM side (after which I could re-import, overwriting the tiddlers with the desired merged-field variants).
Questions:
(1) How hard would it be to get a variant of TiddlyWiki’s import process to merge or “zip together” tiddlers – so that existing tiddlers (based on matching title) might be not simply overwritten, but instead modified only by adding incoming field-data pairs that are new (where existing tiddler lacks those fields)? ALTERNATELY, how hard would it be to add some checkboxes to cells in the “Diff” preview pane (in the import interface) so that one could manually accomplish something like a selectively-merged tiddler?
(2) Would something like this be of interest to others? Could we collectively commission someone to build a solution for this workflow challenge?
Note: I realize for many people, the simple question “which tiddler variant is more recent/complete?” is the extent of the import problem. Merging divergent branches of a tiddlywiki project is often handled well just by selecting which (whole) tiddlers to override, based on being able to inspect their fields. This is itself already important and great.
So, I’m asking whether a merge solution at the next level is possible, when two title-matching tiddlers (or in my case, JSON strings) each carry field-value pairs that belong in the result.
(SMALL update: I suppose my JSON should specify the incoming field title as bibtex-LCCN, since some bibtex records do include this field. Still, none of the bibtex records I’ve imported, so far, come with this field included. What info I have has been manually typed in, over the years, within FileMaker.)
