IMPORTING DATA FROM !ORGANIZER
Those of you who have used the RiscOS application Organizer will be aware that In My Diary has a very similar interface, and it was as a result of missing Organizer when using Windows and MacOS that led me to start work on In My Diary.
It is now possible to import much of your data from Organizer into In My Diary, and the following instructions explain how to do this. Before you decide to do this please remember that In My Diary is NOT Organizer, is NOT an emulation of Organizer, and that there are limitations inherent in the importation which are listed below. If you do not get the result you expect please read the relevant section of this page to see if the reason is listed here. I would also advise you that exportation of diary data is intended for PAST events and not future events: the results of exporting and importing future events cannot be guaranteed.
Briefly exportation involves:
1. Updating to at least version 1.30 of In My Diary
2. Adding new scripts to Organizer's Export folder
3. Exporting files for the Diary, Anniversary and a vCard file for contacts
4. Moving those files over to Windows or MacOS
5. Checking their file extensions
6. Simply dragging the files over your open In My Diary (or loading them from the File menu).
This page of instructions may seem long and complicated but, in reality, the process is fairly intuitive if you are familiar with the updating and saving procedure in RiscOS. Much of what follows is intended and a reference if anything does go wrong - and remember, this is only something you should need to do once.
Firstly you will need to download the new export scripts. This is probably best done from RiscOS so that you can drop them straight into Organizer.
Download Organizer Scripts here
On your RiscOS machine:
Unzip the downloaded archive with Sparkplug or similar and save the opened archive in a suitable place. Within the archive is a directory called Organizer. If you open that you will find what looks like the !Organizer application.
Navigate to the directory where you installed your copy of !Organizer. I would recommend you to make a backup copy of the application for now until you see that installing the new scripts has been successful.
Drag the !Organizer icon from the open archive over the top of your real !Organizer application. If you want to check to see that the scripts have installed, hold down the SHIFT key and double-click over your !Organizer application. The directory will open and you will see a further directory called Exports. Open that to find directories including Diary, Anni and Address. If you open these you should now find text files called IMDanni, IMDdiary and IMDvCard. If you can see these, then the scripts have installed correctly.
Some users have reported that even though the scripts are installed correctly, they are still not available to chose when you come to export your data. If this is the case you may have to quit Organizer and restart it, or even restart your RiscOS machine or emulator.
Exporting in general
(important and may solve your problems if you get no results when you drag the exported files over the diary)
I know you haven't exported the files yet, but I am mentioning this now because it applies to all three forms of export and is important.
Once you have exported your files from Organizer, make sure they have the correct file extensions once back in Windows / OSX. The diary and anniversary files need to have a .txt suffix. The contacts file needs to be .vcf. RiscOS can add other suffixes to file types when moved over into Windows. Depending how you have Windows set up, the file suffix is not always obvious so you might need to perform the following steps.
Open an Explorer window or folder. It doesn't matter which one.
(In Windows XP ) From the Tools menu select 'Folder Options'
(In Vista / Windows 7) From the Organize menu select 'Folder and search Options'
Click the View tab
Make sure Hide extensions for known file types is unchecked
Now that the extensions are visible, check that the files exported from the diary and anniversary sections have a .txt extension (such as 'diarydata.txt') and the vCard a .vcf extension (such as 'contacts.vcf'). If you prefer not to see the extensions any longer after checking as described, you can tick the Hide extensions for known file types box again.
It doesn't matter what order you export your diary, anniversary and contact data but, if you are doing them all at one sitting, please be aware that once you have dragged your first 'export' file to a suitable place, subsequent exports from the other sections will already show the full pathname of your previous save and so be careful to change it to another name or you will overwrite your first exported file.
Exporting your Diary data.
Firstly a necessary work-around: (see the note in italics below though)
As far as I can see, when Organizer exports diary data there is no way to differentiate between how that data was generated. ie. was it automatically generated by the anniversary section, or was it a single or repeating alarm? This will be a problem when importing into In My Diary because, assuming you have anniversaries and birthdays dynamically generated by the Contacts and Anniversary section, you would not want to duplicate these. A work-around method of preventing importation of the data which Organizer has created from the Anniversary section can be done like this:
Open the Choices window from the Task bar, and select the Anniversary section.
Change the default anniversary colour to black (7) - You can change it back later if you want.
Make sure the default colour for diary text is NOT black - Go to the diary section of Choices and change it if necesary.
Later (back in Windows/OSX), from the Options section of In My Diary, make sure you tick Don't import BLACK text to diary before you import the data.
As far as identifying repeating alarms goes, there is no easy way to do that. I suppose I could write convoluted code to parse the data and look for possible patterns in the repeat but that's a bit Heath-Robinsonish and, hey, I need a life too! So, entries that were generated as repeating alarms I am afraid will be imported as stand-alone single entries which, of course, will not continue to be automatically generated as they would in Organizer.
To do the actual exporting, open the diary section of the Organizer file you want to export. Hold down the Ctrl key and press F3.
Set the diary period you want to cover and select In My Diary (IMDdiary) as the Format to export. Give it a meaningful name (Export is the default one) and save the file to a suitable place in the usual RiscOS way.
(please note - version 2.1x of Organizer appears to have a bug where it is exporting incorrect colour information so this work around will not work as described. Version 1.5x works as described. It is a bit more hassle but you can still edit the exported file after you have generated it as follows:
1. Open your exported file in a text editor
2. Find an entry you KNOW to be an anniversary
3. Count back 3 lines to find a 6 digit number (it might be 420600 if you have the same error as me)
4. Make a global change so that all occurrences of that number are changed to 000000
5. Save the edited file. )
There is no way for the script to associate a diary entry with a note. Consequently, any note links will not be preserved.
Exporting Anniversary data
The process for you is exactly the same as for the diary data, but needs to start with the anniversary section open. In My Diary (IMDanni) is the script you need.
Once again, the export script has got to make some assumptions about what it sees. I am providing the following information so you can see why some anniversaries might not import as you would expect.
What happens in the script and when importing -
Firstly the RiscOS smart quote used as the possessive apostrophe s is converted to ascii 39 which works better.
Anniversaries appear to the script as 'completed' entries (eg. 'It's Mary's 24th birthday') In this form, this is not much use for the purposes of importing into In My Diary. So, for each entry, the export script I have written works out and writes the base date when the anniversary originated (thankfully there is a function within Organizer to do this), and follows it with the complete message.
Once imported into In My Diary, the importing code looks for a number in each message which it will take to be the number of years since the base date. If, following the number, there is an ordinal suffix (st, nd, rd, th) the first part of the message (up to the number) is written, followed by %t, followed by the message beyond the number. %n is used instead if the number is not ordinal. If no number is found in the entry, it is imported word for word.
So, what might cause a problem is if you have two numbers in an anniversary. Something like 'It's the 25th Street Scout group's 10th anniversary' will fail because it will assume the first number to be the year data.
Exporting Contact data
To do this, simply use the existing vCard script which is found near the bottom of the list. The IMDvCard script is a new one and you may find this gives better results with the address export.
Only some of the universal fields are imported. These are:
N: full name consisting of prefix (miss, Mr etc.), two forenames, surname, suffix (MBE, DPhil etc.). This full name is automatically placed in the Label field of Contacts, whilst forenames and surname go to their respective fields.
ADD: Up to 7 lines of address. Because Organizer does not have a specific postcode field, you will probably find imported postcodes end up in the main address fields.
TEL: Landline telephone
TEL;CELL: Mobile telephone
BDAY: Birthday information (This is imported if seen but is not exported from my version of Organizer)
EMAIL: email address
URL: a Web address
Exporting your Journal data
This is the easiest of operations. Just locate the Journal directory in your RiscOS setup and copy it over to the In My Diary folder in your Documents folder (/home/user/inmydiary folder for Linux users.) The next time you run In My Diary, the Journal data will be available. In Windows and Mac you will see a 'J' by the side of dates with a journal entry. In native Linux this is sadly not the case, although clicking over a date will have the same effect and the dates which have associated journal entries are visible from View > Journal Entries.
Importing into In My Diary
This is just a matter of dragging the files you have exported from their folder to the open diary section of In My Diary. If you are using Linux you may find this method doesn't work properly so you can import the files from the File menu > Import from Organizer.
If all is correct, you should get a message telling you the data has been imported.
If nothing at all happens, check the file extensions as described above
If you get a message telling you the file cannot be imported it is either an unsuitable text file, or the file has become corrupted.