AHK and formatting text & SQLite for storing reports

I love AHK but its output is a bit grim and 70’s as far as presentation goes. You just get raw text, so good for code editing but as final product pretty plain.

It would be nice to be able to format the text so that at least you can highlight specific information with bold, header or colour.

There seems no easy way to do this apart from writing the text as HTML to a HTML file or RTF (Which I’ve yet to explore).

I did think about Markdown, which is used on Github, but you need a special viewer to read them so its not a universal viewing code, unlike HTML. As its not as common or accessible I’ll stick with HTML at this time.

This issue came about from my inventory report file. When I saw the results it looks particularly plain, and I wanted it to stand out a bit, so maybe getting some markdown or HTML formatting would make the report easier to read.

There is a WinClip class and a forum article on it here. It is able to paste the code in a formatted way if its in clipboard,. so it can take some HTML code and have that pasted somewhere. I think the idea behind it is that text isn’t parsed but pasted as a lump so fomatting comes across.

So you can just write the HTML into the strings that you are file appending to the script, these will save to a HTML file (so need a browser to open, or you could use the winclip and copy the file and paste it directly into the email body so that it reads formatted. I may need to try this method too.

My one concern is that, if you send someone a file to action, they may need to strip the formatting to get at the underlying text, so by actually formatting it you are making the whole process more difficult.

I suppose this is like other coding language outputs like python, I’m thinking of the HTML pages I was using python to create for my 360 degree panoramas. That also needed to be formatted so that it read correctly.

SQLite database for storing older reports

The bulking up of reports from creating a daily inventory means lots of files being created. A better method is to use a database to store the output from the reporting process, so that all updates are stored in a structured manner such that they can be easily queried.

I started looking at SQLite, which you can loaod onto an android device as well as normal OS’s. As it createsa DB on a pc you can copy it or read it on another pc (I think) and you can have pre-scripted queries (built with AHK’s ) to create query reports on the database. In fact, you could have the actual inventory on the database, that will keep all the information in one place.

A further progression along the path of developing an open source inventory system.

End comment

The text formatting is just something that popped up and bugged me. I’ll think about a better presentation method. I was just reading an article about colouring text in Teminal with Python, so others think about this stuff too.

The SQLite is actually a better solution as it can keep all the inventory and the changes in one database, so easy to query. This may be a further step to developing a robust Inventory system. I wonder if I want to develop and explore it? I have enjoyed building up a simple inventory system. Is there a justification for making it more sophisticated?

Maybe if I want to explore the Asset Management process of inventory then I should. After all, Asset Inventory and condition is just another inventory. So developing a DB backend will allow for expansion. Do do query on list you have to do SQL query on DB and then retrieve data. A good way to get into the DB stuff, which can be fun.

I’m happy with the level of sophistication for the Freezer inventory process, and doing it all again for DB backend does not fill me with erxcitement. I’d need to think of another project to build it on. I’ll t’ink about it.

The AHK video’s are not getting many views, I suppose the apps I’m doing are too specific to be of general interest. Still handy for me as referece as I move onto other things.