Where’s my Data ?
The PersisTables Toolkit makes it easy to save data. This is achieved by using the TKTable_Save() function. We need to specify appropriate function parameters (the moniker (location) and name) we want to give to the data. Reloading the data is done with the same moniker and name, using the TKTable_Load() function. However, as the number of data tables increases it becomes progressively more difficult to remember the correct moniker and name of a specific PersisTable.
The PersisTables Toolkit comes with an easy to use Persistence Viewer which allows a user to search for a particular PersisTable. The Persistence Viewer can be accessed by right clicking on a blank cell within the Excel workbook and selecting it from the context menu.
– right click on empty cell
Clicking the ‘Persistence Viewer’ menu option opens the View Arena dialog box.
The Viewer allows you to search for a PersisTable that has been previously saved. To understand how it works we need to introduce a couple of new concepts. An Arena is a place to which PersisTables can be saved. In this case we see that we are looking at the ‘Local’ Arena and this is located in the AppData area of the logged in user. The Local Arena is defined for each user and is private to that user. We will discuss how we can set up an Arena to share data later.
If we click on the + button next to the Arena name it opens to show us a list of ‘Genres’. A Genre will normally hold a collection of PersisTables that represent a collection of data which are related in some business sense. A Genre may hold Customer details, another Genre may hold Regional Sales Accounts. Alternatively one Genre may hold a copy of input data to a spreadsheet and another may hold a copy of the output data. The division of PersisTable data into Genres is a business decision but can be key to how useful the PersisTables Toolkit is. A sensible division will enable information to be found quickly.
Data can be stored in a number of different formats. The Daily Summary data saved previously is held as a CSV (comma separated values) file, a common format for sharing data with Excel. If the View within the Viewer is set to ‘CSV’ then we can see the data we saved.
Here in the right hand pane we can see the PersisTable we saved earlier as a CSV file in the ‘Daily Summary’ Genre. If the item is selected we can ‘View’ the contents of the PersisTable, ‘Link’ to it which will write the moniker for the PersisTable to the cell from which the Persistence Viewer was launched, or ‘Select’ the PersisTable which will load the PersisTable into the launching cell.
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