This sounds great! A few thoughts:
- I assume this will lead to the deprecation of the current "sort" and
"order" parameters?
- on that note, how can one specify the order of sorting, if more than one
column is sorted? Or is the main "sort" parameter still needed for that?
- one other suggestion for a "printout parameter" would be "+ delim=" or "+
delimiter=", which would let you set the character that separates multiple
values for this property, if there was more than one; with ", " as the
default. This was just discussed in a previous thread, but as a query-wide
parameter; it probably makes more sense as a printout parameter. (By the
way, it could also be called "+ sep=", if that's not too confusing.)
-Yaron
On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 3:41 AM, Markus Krötzsch <
markus@...> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> a feature announcement: the next version of SMW will allow you to control
> the
> appearance of printouts in queries in various new ways. Printouts are
> statements of the form "?Property" (or similar) in #ask queries. In table
> format, a printout leads to a new column.
>
> One would often like to attach further parameters to printouts to control
> their appearance, but #ask supported parameters only for the whole query so
> far. This has changed, and it is now possible to add further parameters to
> a
> printout by writing them in the form "|+ parameter=value" after the
> printout.
> The following example illustrates the parameters supported so far:
>
> {{#ask: [[Category:Country]]
> |?name |+ limit=1
> |?Category |+ order=ascending
> |?population |+ align=right
> |?president |+ index=1
> }}
>
> Here we have 4 printouts with one parameter each. The meaning is as
> follows:
>
> * The parameter "limit" restricts the number of values that will be shown
> (a
> country might have multiple alternative names, but we want to see only one
> here).
> * The parameter "order" causes the values to be orders. Possible values are
> "ascending"/"asc" and "descending"/"desc". The default is unordered. Note
> that
> this works also for category printouts.
> * "align" is an example of a parameter that is specific to a format: when
> used
> in tables, the respective column will be aligned as indicated. Possible
> values
> are "left" (default), "right", and "center". This is useful here since
> numbers
> are more readable when right-aligned.
> * The parameter "index" is used to address single fields in multi-valued
> properties. Imagine that "president" is a multi-valued property with
> entries
> of the form "name; begin of office; end of office." We only want to see the
> names here, and hence we state "index=1" ("index=2" would show only the
> begin
> of office etc.).
>
> The new feature is not perfect yet, and especially the parameters are not
> supported by Special:Ask at the moment, so they are lost when clicking
> further
> results. Moreover, "limit" is not always acting as desired: since the
> datatype
> of the property that is used here is still some multi-valued type, many
> query
> printers will not recognize the datatype of the selected component
> properly.
> For example, you cannot have a timeline based on the second component of
> the
> "president" property, since timeline looks for "Type:Date" and does not
> find
> it in the property "president". "index" should still be a useful feature,
> e.g.
> for templated formatting of multi-valued properties.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Markus
>
> --
> Markus Krötzsch <
markus@...>
> * Personal page:
http://korrekt.org> * Semantic MediaWiki:
http://semantic-mediawiki.org> * Semantic Web textbook:
http://semantic-web-book.org> --
>
>
>
>
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