Virtual tiddlers

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#21

I know I look like I am “talking to myself”, but I have now found another mechanism for virtual tiddlers which can work similarly to missing tiddlers, only these can be missing tiddlers of a particular type eg; missing todo tiddler. This information can then be used to create actual tiddlers using a named template.

[Edited] A quick hint how

When adding a title in wiki text it becomes a missing tiddler. You can type these directly in camel case or inside [[]]. One other thing we can glean from a missing tiddler title is where it is written. So if you add a title to a tiddler such as “todos” you imply that title is a to do, even when it is still missing.

You can also use a temporary field using edit-text and a button and store new titles in one or more selected locations.

More…

Lets say you have a wiki where you classify tiddlers using an object-type field eg contact, todo, reference etc… Then within such tiddlers your typing results in a missing tiddler title, It would be trivial to determin a default tiddler type to use for missing tiddlers defined therein.

  • similarly you could list missing tiddler titles based on this implied type.
  • I suggest a missing tiddler title to be the same type as the tiddler it is mentioned in unless that tiddler sets another in a new-object-type-here field.

Even more

So a title can remain missing with no matching tiddler indefinatly and be assigned various properties by simply placing that title in other places.

2 Likes
Data tiddlers are forced into type=application/json
#22

As yet another example of using a different type, I am considering certain “types” having fields that specifically refer to tiddlers of other “types”. For a silly example, maybe my Contact tiddlers have a field “spirit-animal” which will be of type Animal - but could contain a missing Animal tiddler if I’ve never created the tiddler for that animal yet. Certain address fields such as “city” or “country” could also refer to tiddlers of types “City” and “Country” containing information such as population, flag, and whatever other information I want to store about cities and countries - but here too, I might add the city information for a Contact even though I haven’t yet created a city tiddler for that contact.

I am (for the moment) mainly considering this so that the “edit” button for such tiddlers can automatically give the correct type and add some fields (so, less of a “virtual tiddler” and more of a tiddler creation helper), but in principle, I could also use the view template cascade to in order to add templates to display such tiddlers according to their type.

  • Each type could have an associated data dictionary mapping fields to their respective types.
  • I’m sure one could come up with many other ways of enabling the determination of the type, for example, such field names themselves could be prefixed or suffixed like “spirit-animal:Animal”

Actually, the city example would pose the challenge of non-unique city names; most likely, the city tiddler titles would have to include state/province and country in the title, but then the “city” tiddlers would be semantically contained by a combination of fields in Contact tiddlers. Of course it’s possible to handle such cases, but it does make me think the possibilities are too various to have a one-size-fits-all solution for all virtual tiddlers.

#23

Love it! One simple additional feature I would like is for the either the bingo squares or the text contained in them to be links to the tiddlers defining the terms.

#24

This is one of those minor projects that fills some brief bits of spare time, mostly trying to come up with new definitions. Once I have those complete(-ish) I will do something like that. I have several ideas, but haven’t spent much time contemplating which one I want.

  • The squares are just marked off on your bingo card when you click them, perhaps with some automatic full bingo recognition.
  • The squares are simple links to the definition tiddlers
  • The squares act like flippable flash cards that reveal the definitions on the back side.

And I’ve thought about combinations of these as well.

This is fun, but is very low priority for me.