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Ideas for bulk generator data entry?

JohnnFour

Game Master
Staff member
Adamantium WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Gamer Lifestyle
Demonplague Author
Borderland Explorer
The Generator Service is fantastic for setting up and managing your generators.

It's not good right now at bulk adding entries. The feature is in the backlog, but vNext will be our prirority in 2020.

My current process is to use Excel. I put entries into a sheet, add all the syntax, export to csv, open the csv in a text editor, copy, then paste into the Generator Service in code mode.

Just wondering if anyone could think of a faster path?

Maybe there's an online yaml or json formatting tool? Or a different approach with fewer steps.

What do you folks do for adding lots of entries to a generator in most efficient fashion?
 

ELF

Generator Sage
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
The Generator Service is fantastic for setting up and managing your generators.
Unfortunately the generator UI also messes up the generator structure, so it is write-only for me. Any generator editing must be made in a separate editor. My weapon of choice is Atom.

My current process is to use Excel. I put entries into a sheet, add all the syntax, export to csv, open the csv in a text editor, copy, then paste into the Generator Service in code mode.
A spreadsheet is useful for collecting and sorting material, and maybe doing some simple generator prototyping as well. I myself use Google Sheets for this.

But isn't the CSV export phase unnecessary? I usually just copy a column to clipboard and paste it into a text editor for cleanup with some custom macros. For this, I use Notepad++ which is nicely customizable and better suited to this task than Atom. At this stage I have the entries as a list with one entry per line. The macros remove extra space, sort the entries, remove any duplicates and insert the minimal syntax to make the lists YAML-compatible.

Finally I copy the cleaned-up text into a YAML-based generator template in Atom. The template ensures that the generator has all the standard entry points and other functionality in the standard order (which the generator UI would change) and minimizes the need of manual editing to achieve these.
 
Last edited:

BahneGorkDK

Active member
Wizard of Story
Gamer Lifestyle
im fairly okay with excel-powerquery and have created a few tools at work that takes data and reshapes it to a new structure/syntax.

is the syntax simply the following?

-entries:
- m: 1
v: "record"
name: "record"
 
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ELF

Generator Sage
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
is the syntax simply the following?

Yeah, and it can be even a bit simpler. I don't typically use the "m" value to indicate weighing. This is an example of a simple generator table called count using the YAML format:

Code:
  - name: count
    explanation: "Singular and plural topics."
    entries:
      - '{single}'
      - '{multiple}'
      - '{uncountable}'

In most cases you can also drop the single quotes, but some formatting requires them.

Note that if you edit a tables in the generator GUI, it messes up the table structure (but the end result will still work).
 
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