Create new association
To create new association you have several alternatives:
- Use association editor. Consider this alternative if you are familiar with topic maps. You can ease association editor usage by constructing a schema for associations.
- Paste associations. Consider association paste if you have the association data available in external application such as spreadsheet application. To paste associations you need to construct simple text fragments in external application and transfer them to Wandora via clipboard.
- Use Wandora's drag and drop feature to create associations. This option is for Wandora experts. To create associations with drag and drop, you create and select template association, and drop player topics over the template.
- Draw associations between graph nodes representing topics. This alternative uses schemaless association editor but initializes the editor with topics user has drawn an association between in Graph topic panel.
- Make associations between Sketch grid cells. This new feature is very intuitive and has many association layout variations.
Next chapters examine association creation alternatives more detailed.
Association editor
Association editor allows you to pick up an association type, all players (except the context player) and roles. Association editor starts with a menu option Add association.... Menu option locates both in a context menu which opens while right mouse clicking the Associations title, and in a top menu, under Topics > Add to topic.
Each association topic is picked by clicking a topic button. A topic button has a label <No topic> whenever there is no topic available. The label changes to topic's base name when you pick a topic into the button. To add another player-role pair to the association press Add player button. To remove player-role pair press Remove button right to the player-role pair. Use defaults button is used to fill in default roles and association type for the association. Default roles and type might be useful if you need to create associations rapidly and don't care the association type nor roles. Use previous button is used to fill in association type and roles you used to create previous association. This eases the creation of similar associations.
New association is created when you press OK button. Pressing Cancel closes the association editor and no association is created.
Picking topics may be frustrating if you have to create numerous associations. To ease the association editor usage you may construct a schema for your associations.
Notice, an association in Wandora may not contain multiple players with a same role. If you add association a player with role already in the association, new player-role pair replaces immediately old player-role pair. This limitation is shortly described in Reduced Topic Maps.
Injecting associations via clipboard
Addition to association editors described above Wandora allows the user to inject or paste association via clipboard. Clipboard injection allows you to construct associations in external applications such as text editor. Association paste is started by right mouse clicking the Associations title and by selecting a menu option Paste > Paste associations... found in the context menu.
Paste associations injects clipboard associations to Wandora. Wandora expects the clipboard contains a text formatted like
association_type role_1 role_2 player_a1 player_a2 player_b1 player_b2
where each line is separated with newline character. Each token within a line is separated with tab character. Each token represents topic's base name. If topic does not exist, Wandora consults the user and rejects the base name or creates a topic for the base name. Number of roles and players should be equal. Number of association roles (columns) or associations (lines) is not limited. User may even inject multiple different associations within a single paste. Additional newline character should separate different association types:
association_type role_1 role_2 player_a1 player_a2 player_b1 player_b2 another_association_type role_1 role_2 role_3 player_a1 player_a2 player_a3 player_b1 player_b2 player_b3 player_c1 player_c2 player_c3
As you may paste any kind of associations you may not see created associations immediately after paste as topic panel views only such associations that contain opened topic as a player or association type. To see created association use finder to locate and open player topic for example.
Injecting associations using existing associations
Instead of pasting complete associations the user can also paste associations using existing associations. This feature assumes that the user
- Has copied topics to system clipboard,
- Has selected one player topic of an association in an association table.
- Selects paste option Edit > Paste.
Selected association is used as a template where selected player is replaced with topics found in the system clipboard. System clipboard text is interpreted as a set of base names delimited by tab and new-line characters. Number of created associations is equal to the number of topics found in system clipboard text. If system clipboard text doesn't match any topic in Wandora, Wandora asks whether or not the user wants to create a topic for the base name.
This method resembles closely the method described below.
Creating associations with drag and drop
Wandora enables drag and drop feature for topics in tables and trees. To start drag
- Select topics with LEFT mouse button
- Keep LEFT mouse button pressed and move mouse.
You may drop topics to association table for example. Association table drop creates new associations, one for each dragged topic. New associations have
- Same association type as the association at the drop point
- Same roles as the association at the drop point
- Same players as the association at the drop point except the player at the drop point! The player at the drop point is replaced with dragged topics.
Another way of thinking the association drop is to think the association at the drop point as a template for new associations. Template defines association type, roles and players except the one at the drop point. As topic drag drags actually topic's base name the feature works also when topics are dragged from external applications such WWW browser. Drag and drop enables extremely easy method to generate similar associations.
New topic is created for each dropped base name not known in Wandora. As Wandora can't resolve the subject identifier for created topics, default subject identifier is inserted into each created topic.
When you create new association with the drag'n'drop feature, new association generally appears to the association table. However, it is possible that the created association is not visible due to the association's players.
See also
