Visitor Board Data and Formatting

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mark_anderson_us
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Visitor Board Data and Formatting

Post by mark_anderson_us »

Hi All

We want to have a visitor board the shows:

Company1
Visitor1
Visitor2

Company2
Visitor1
Visitor2
Visitor3

There can be 3 companies visiting and 1-3 people from each. The screen is big enough to fit all vistors on one screen

I have the data in Excel and an SQL query (using ODBC) that gets the visitors for that day.

I'm not sure how to handle the variable no of visitors though. i'm going to have to have 2 text regions as the compnay is formatted differently to the visitor name. I want company 2 to be under company 1 (with 1 line space) regardless how many visitors.

Anyone done anything like this before?

Regards

mark
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Trent S
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Re: Visitor Board Data and Formatting

Post by Trent S »

Hello Mark,

If you are interested in simply bolding or using a different color for Company Name, then what you are trying to achieve could be accomplished with a small addition inside of your Excel document.

What we'll need is a way to know if there is information in each visitor row inside of Excel. This can be achieved by adding another column to your sheet that checks to see if the information in your visitor column is empty. If it is empty, the column displays nothing; if there is a visitor, then the column will display "\n" (our line break character used in Noventri Suite).

As as example:

COLUMN 1--------------COLUMN 2---------------COLUMN 3
Noventri-------------------------------------------\n
--------------------------Trent Semler-------------\n
--------------------------Tim Rollins--------------- \n
--------------------------John Smith-------------- \n

Inside of Suite, you would stack all of your regions on top of one another (instead of laying them out in different, pre-planned locations).

The first region, which would represent Company 1, would not require any special formatters. In our example above, it would be [1:1] (for Row 1, Column 1) and display "Noventri."

The next region, which would represent Visitor 1, would have 1 line break (to compensate for the Company Name on the first region) followed immediately by the formatter for Visitor 1. In our example above, it would be [2:2] (for Row 2, Column 2) and display "Trent Semler."

Subsequent regions would need to check all of the rows before them to see if our "\n" character is present. So - the region representing Visitor 2 would need to have the following formatters:
\n (for our first line break that compensates for the Company Name, since this is a constant), [2:3] (for Row 2, Column 3 - this is "checking" to see if there is a Visitor 1), and finally [3:2] (to display Visitor 2, if there is a Visitor 2).

The region that displays Visitor 3 would read as follows:
\n [2:3][3:3][4:2]

This would give us a line break for Company 1, a line break for Trent Semler, a line break for Tim Rollins, and finally display John Smith (using the [4:2] formatter).

This pattern would be repeated all the way until you've displayed the 3rd possible visitor for Company 2.



I hope this was of some assistance!

Please let me know if have any questions or would like me to further explain.

Kind Regards,
Trent Semler
Art Director
Specialized Communications Corp. / Noventri
20940 Twin Springs Dr.
Smithsburg, MD 21783-1510 USA
301-790-0103
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mark_anderson_us
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Re: Visitor Board Data and Formatting

Post by mark_anderson_us »

Thanks Trent

I think I get it and that may work, unless of course I want the Company name in 18pt and the visitors in 12pt. then I need 1.5 LF's.

Once we have HTML, I can just generate an HTML table from my SQL

Regards

mark
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