[r-t] Central Council Methods Library

[Bill Purvis]

On 31/05/18 13:51, Graham John wrote:
> On 31 May 2018 at 02:39, Don Morrison <dfm at ringing.org> wrote:
>
>> For mechanical things, yes. But not for humans.
> and
>
>> But, while the new text format imports easily into a spreadsheet, for
>> reasons I gave in an earlier email, it’s not so useful: you need to do some
>> seriously non-spreadsheet sorts of activities to, say, get all the lead end
>> J (non-little, single dodging) surprise major methods start with notation
>> x5x4, and containing FCH B. That’s surprisingly straightforward to do from
>> Tony’s format simply using a good text editor.
> There is something I am not understanding here, or more likely I am
> not communicating well enough. There are now four ways in which you
> can now look at the CCCBR Methods Library. The first and most
> important, is a the provision of a database containing the official CC
> Library, which has never been provided before. It can easily be
> searched by a non technical ringer, displays the blue line and a huge
> range of method properties for those with a deeper interest, and
> allows you to search on most combinations of them. For example, I
> struggle to think how you could search for methods that are Bristol
> above in a text format - something that is very easy in Complib. It
> even provides an advanced search by hunt bell properties, even if they
> are not the principal hunt. It is ideally suited to the type of search
> you quote above, and is far easier to enter and refine than searching
> a text file or working with a spreadsheet. That should provide the
> features that 99% of ringers need, and for that reason I believe that
> it largely replaces the need for a text format. Nevertheless I am
> still happy to provide a text format, and will take on board your
> comments to revise it.
>
> Graham
>
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Well I, for one, would like to have something that I can use when I'm not
online. Putting it into a spreadsheet means I can use it without needing
internet access.

I have not yet reached the stage where I need to access
all the clever bits, just name, classification, stage, notation. I've now
got a program that extracts this from the XML file in .CSV format. If I need
any other information I can always tweak up my program to add further items.

I'm not too bothered about it being bang up to date either, though it's
easy enough to download the XML version and re-run my program.

The program is written in C and uses the Linux libxml library to 
decipher the XML
structure.

Bill

-- 
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| Bill Purvis                            |
| email: bill at billp.org                  |
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