Various forms of data compression are employed all over the computing world. In many instances, you may need to read compressed data or create your own. This article is the first in a series about data compression and the tools available within Legato. We will start with an overview and then dive into the ubiquitous zip method by creating a little program to zip a project.

A combo box is a great tool to allow users to select options. Combo boxes, as the name implies, combine the functionality of an edit control with that of a list box. In this article we will look at the functionality of combo boxes and explore their implementations.

Allowing the user to select items or review lists of data is fundamental to many interfaces. For one or two items, radio buttons or check boxes can work, but for more complex data, a list box can be a good choice. In this blog, I will cover the ‘listbox’ common control, one of many methods of presenting and managing lists of data.

In my first article about dialog boxes, I introduced how dialogs work and provided an overview dialog resources. In the article, we’ll dive into three dialog procedures and some common controls employed in a simple survey program.

Need to have a user login, get some settings, and then direct them to confirm information? You need a dialog box. To create and use dialog boxes, you need some basic information to get started. This article will introduce dialog boxes and teach you the fundamentals about using them.

The technical term for a web address is a Uniform Resource Identifier or URI. The contents of a URI can be very simple, such as ‘www.gofiler.online’, or very complex. A URL, the common name for a web page is actually a Uniform Resource Locator, which is a component of a larger URI. From within a Legato script one may find the need to either build a query or perhaps take one apart. In this post we will explore how URIs work and how to work with them within Legato.

Comma delimited data is perhaps the simplest way of representing a table of information. Many applications that export data will produce a CSV file, allowing for simple and fast extraction of data. However, despite the fact that CSV is a common format, it is not standardized. Reading and writing may also seem simple, but there are sticking points, such as how to handle commas and line returns that occur in the data itself. Wouldn’t it be nice to have tools to deal with CSV data? Legato does.

Programming can contain many layers of abstraction. A useful layer is to change manner in which the computer actually sees your program. Language ‘directives’ do just that. In this article we will explore three of the commonly used program directives and discuss how they can be used with Legato.

If you’re interested in automating certain aspects of document conversion, then look no further. The TranslateSetPostProcessHook function in Legato is what you need. Added in GoFiler 4.20a, this function allows any direct import or insert from a file action to be post processed by a custom script.

Editing text is the foundation of many computer applications, and there are a lot of ways to access and manage textual data and the editing process. As a user changes text, characters and lines of data must be altered, deleted, or inserted, which in turn requires potentially large swaths of data be shifted to accommodate the changes. As you might imagine, actions like these can become extremely cumbersome and time consuming. In addition, there are times you might want to randomly access a data within a text file, say by a line. If we have a large chunk of text in memory or a file and we want to go to line 3017, the program would have to count line endings from the start of the data until it reached the 3017th link. Yuck! Let’s see what Legato can do to help managing text as it’s edited.

A taxonomy style guide isn’t about creating a memorable “style”. The style guide is about building clear, transparent, understandable standards that result in predictable communication every time. XBRL relies on a taxonomy of concepts to identify facts, contexts and other relationships. Any ambiguity in the language used within that taxonomy to communicate data, could produce inconsistent results.

There are many occasions when a programmer needs to read or write from a text file (or HTML/XML). While sometimes you may need to complete just a minor task like accessing a file name, other times you may have to hold and edit the file contents. Legato offers a spread of low to high level functions for file access. This article explores various methods of manipulating file data. In subsequent articles, we will explore each in detail.

In this article, we will be discussing error codes and error processing while making the complex simpler and taking the mystery out of error processing.

Like many programs, the GoFiler application can be run from a command-line or shell command. By learning some basics, you can run and control the application directly from a command prompt or shell execute. Further, by using some script code you can do much more than just open a file.

This week we will be covering scanning, testing, and some functions for manipulating textual string data.