Whenever you are writing a script, getting information to and from users is always a very important (and often complicated) part. There needs to be a way to notify the user that something has happened or to ask a user a simple question. Legato provides a basic interface for performing these tasks using message boxes.

Legato has several functions to help manage displaying and tracking time. It might be very useful to know, for example, how long has it been since the last action was performed. Say you want to run a task every five minutes. Well, you need some way to check to see if five minutes has elapsed or not. Additionally, if you want to display time to a user, you need to make sure that the time is displayed in an intelligible format, not just a number of milliseconds seconds since 1970 or something equally useless to anyone except a machine. This article will discuss a few of the functions that simplify this.

While writing Legato scripts, a common task is to alert a user or list of users about an action taking place. One of the best ways to do this is through sending an email. Legato has a very handy built-in function EmailSendMessage, that can do this for you with very little effort. Below is a basic script that shows how you can send an email.

So far in this blog, we’ve mentioned a couple of ways that Legato can improve or replace existing functionality and add new features entirely to GoFiler through the use of hooks that can happen pre- or post-process on a GoFiler function or by hooking a script to custom menu items. Now we’ll talk about a third method of enhancing GoFiler’s functionality.

One of the most powerful tools in Legato is the ability to utilize an ODBC Connector to pull information from a database. ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) is a standard interface included in Windows that lets you connect to any type of database. Other applications (such as GoFiler through Legato) can talk to the database using this ODBC interface as an intermediary. This week’s blog post will be discussing ODBC, what it is, how to set it up, and what it can do for you. Next week we will explore an example where Legato actually uses it.

This week we examine a script that replaces Wingdings checkboxes with Unicode checkboxes. This is a very useful thing to do for cross-browser compatibility, as some web browsers do not display Wingdings font sets correctly. Our script iterates over the document and examines every HTML tag to determine if it’s a font tag. If it is, the script checks if the tag has Wingdings set as its font. If so, the script then checks if the font tag is bold or not and stores this information. If the font tag has bold tags inside of it, the script notes that before removing them. The script also removes any space characters and checks the contents of the font tag. If all that remains is an ‘x’ character, it replaces the ‘x’ with a Unicode checkbox. If all that’s left is a ¨ char or an ‘o’ character, it replaces it with a Unicode open box. The script then adds tags as appropriate to embolden the checkbox.

Building on what we did last week, this week we’ll add more information to our EDGAR Filing log. Last week, we examined a script that automatically ran after a user in GoFiler uses the File Live, File Test or File Test As Agent menu function. This function created a filing log by adding a new row into a simple CSV file to record information. Now we’ll add more information to the filing log from two sources: an SDK function to access data after GoFiler files the document and the Accession Notice file in the Mailbox directory.

Last week in the Legato Developers Corner, we hooked a user function onto a new menu item. Now we’re going to look at another way to add functionality to GoFiler by creating a script that runs automatically to record a log of each EDGAR filing made using GoFiler.

This week in our Legato Developers Corner, we’re going to be looking at a small script that allows you to add an option to the GoFiler Extensions Tools menu, which will run a polish table operation with presets. This is very useful if you want to have a polish table script set up to execute with preset settings.