Bull Trowell

From ClothoWiki

Summary

Bull Trowell is an easy way to input part information from a Microsoft excel-like spreadsheet into Clotho, where it can be parsed into parts and saved as a collection in Collection View

Launching Bull Trowell

When you launch Bull Trowell, you'll get a control panel for launching the individual importers. You import one type of object at a time, and other than that it's pretty self-explanatory. When you click on one of the control panel's buttons, you'll launch a window with a table in it. You enter data into that table either by clicking on a cell and typing, or by pasting from a spreadsheet.

Moving data into Bull Trowell

From an Excel or Google doc spreadsheet, you can copy (control C) and then paste (control v) into a Bull Trowell spreadsheet. You can also copy (control C) from Bull Trowell and paste into Excel. The tables in Bull Trowell give you the option of entering more information than is really necessary. The instructions in the upper left corner of each window tell you what is really critical. You'll be putting your data in line by line. As an example, I've taken a snapshot of a Basic Parts importer with some data in it:

In this example, most of the parts I'm importing are in RFC10, and JCAnderson is the author I want for most of them. So, I set the two choosers at the top of the window accordingly. For the few that aren't RFC10 (one is a CDS part, and to express RFC10 properly for a CDS part you have to call it a different Format, RFC10 - CDS. Another Part is a BglBricks part, so I type BglBricks next to it). For two of the Parts, I want jennyj to be the author, so I'll type her name in. Once I have all my data typed it, I click submit. (I did it for real after taking this screenshot, and it worked just fine).

Data Validation

Bull Trowell goes through what you typed in line by line and validates the data. If you typed in a Format or Author, it will look those up by name and use them to override the default. In Clotho, a Part must obey its Format. So, it checks to see if it can make a Part out of the sequence you gave it. It also checks that the name is unique in the database and that the sequence has not already been entered as a part. If either of these occurs, Clotho will throw a message asking you what to do. If any of the above failed such as you put in an invalid sequence or you misspelled the name of a Format, Bull Trowell will ignore that line. All the ones that did work will be cleared from the list, and their names will appear in the box in the top right corner of the window. Bull Trowell will not visually tell you what is wrong with each entry, but if you learn how to interpret the Message Stream (in Error Reporter widget), the information is in that stream. Bull Trowell will then package up all the new Parts that did get parsed correctly into a Collection and launch the default Collection viewer (usually Collection View) on it. None of your newly added parts will be saved to the database in the process. You'll have to do any saving yourself. Usually what you'll want to do is move your new objects from the output Collection into your personal Collection or a Collection associated with the project at hand and then save that Collection along with all the new objects.

Clearing the data

At any time during this process you can clean out what shows up in your importer's window by clicking "clear." You can reuse that importer window and import more objects with another submission. If you do so, the new objects will go to the same transient Collection that was used for the first batch.