In past blog entries I’ve written, the topic is often about simple scripts. It’s covered a couple hundred lines of code, and the script usually handles a single function. This means that every script that’s been covered so far has been relatively simplistic in structure, with no more than 10 or so separate functions. With so little code, a script can still be easily maintainable even if no thought is given to how it’s put together. The design of the application is less important in these cases. However, what if you want to do a larger project? What if your script is going to include multiple UI screens and integrate with multiple systems? This is where you would want to pay some attention to design and apply some software design practices to the script to ensure that you get the best possible result. The blog post this week will not contain an example of the script but will rather discuss how we can apply some software engineering principles to Legato design to avoid common pitfalls.

Maybe you can stripe candy canes too, given it’s the season. However, this blog post is talking about striping tables! We had another feature request for GoFiler last week that we thought would make a good blog post. This request concerned developing a way for GoFiler to start striping the table after the first dollar sign in the table instead of at the normal body position that GoFiler detects. There are two ways we could do this: we could spend a lot of time modifying a core function of GoFiler, the Polish Table function, or we could make a Legato script that fires on post-process and re-does the striping of the table. The latter is preferable because it doesn’t affect other uses who perhaps don’t want or need this feature. Anyone who does can simply add this script to the extensions folder and that user can get the benefits of a new features.

Here at Novaworks, we often get requests for features to add to GoFiler. Our topic this week is a client request that I think is another good example of how to use Legato to do some HTML parsing and modification. The original request was to have a way to detect paragraphs within table cells with underlines (border-bottom property) or underline tags in them. It would be great to remove the underlines from the paragraphs and put them on the table cell with the paragraphs instead. This script will work with two selection modes in an HTML file: you can either drag-select the table cells on which you want to run it, or you can click in a cell and run the script without selecting anything. Our script takes the start of your selection and finds the previous table cell. Then, working from that point until the end of the current cell or your selection, it locates any paragraphs with underlines or underline tags. If it finds them, it removes them and puts them in the table cell instead.