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  Belen 3:42 am on March 26, 2021 Permalink  

  Feature update – Account dashboard, version control, keyboard shortcuts and new functions: .erase and .remove 

  Here’s what’s new: Account dashboard Version control New functions: .erase and .remove Keyboard shortcuts

  Account dashboard All GuidedTrack users now get access to a dashboard for their accounts. When they visit it, they can see the GuidedTrack programs and apps they’ve used in the past. If they want to, they have the option to clear out any data these apps have collected. They can also choose to delete their entire account. You can direct the users of your programs to https://www.guidedtrack.com/account so that they manage their own data provided they were logged in when the data was generated. This can help you stay compliant with GDPR since GDPR requires providing a way for users of your program to delete their own data. You will also find a link to the dashboard by clicking on the “Account” dropdown menu option:

  Version control You may have noticed a new “History” button on the navigation bar when you are editing a program. If you click it, it will display the list of different versions of your program: When you select a prior version of your program, its code will load on the code editor and you can use the Restore button to revert to it.

  New functions: .erase and .remove Deleting elements from collections and associations is now easier than ever with the new erase and remove functions!   Deleting from a collection  Look at this code: The collection tripsThisYear is a list of all the trips you have made this year. If you want to completely forget you ever went to “London”, you would use the erase function to delete all of the elements in the collection that match that specific value. Alternatively you can choose to delete a given position in a collection using the remove function: In this example, the element in the fourth position of the collection would be deleted and you would defriend “Tim”.   Deleting from an association  When working with associations, the remove function will delete the element whose key matches what you want to remove: After running the code above, the only numbers left in your phoneBook will be Mara and Sue’s! The erase method, on the other hand, works in a similar way as it does with collections, deleting all elements whose value match a given one: In the example, favFoods has your friends’ names associated to their favorite foods and you are deleting Pete and John, since their favorite food is cake.

  Keyboard shortcuts The GuidedTrack code editor now accepts two more keyboard shortcuts: Use Cmd+s (macOS) or Ctrl+s (Windows) to save the program you are editing. Use Cmd+Shift+c (macOS) or Ctrl+Shift+c (Windows) to comment or uncomment the line of code where your cursor is at. If you want to comment a block of consecutive lines, highlight the block and use the same combination of keys.

   
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  Belen 3:03 pm on December 30, 2020 Permalink  

  Feature update – Q&A site, retrieve email address of a logged in user, configure "reply-to" for emails and two new methods! 

  Here’s what’s new: Q&A Site Retrieve the email address of a logged in user Configure a “Reply-to” address Find out the type of a variable or convert it to text

  Q&A site Do you have a question? Go to https://answers.guidedtrack.com/questions and ask the GuidedTrack community or browse through the questions that have already been posted. You can also find the link to the the Q&A site under the “Help” menu: And if you see a question that you have the answer to, please don’t hesitate to share it!

  Get the email address of a logged in user Now you can retrieve the email address of a logged in user of your program. Here is the syntax: We have created a new *database command that allows your program to interact with GuidedTrack’s database. For now, it can only be used to retrieve a user’s email address but in the future you will be able to create, update and delete records – just stay tuned! Now, in order to protect the privacy of GuidedTrack users, they may need to grant permission to your program so that it can get their email address. When this happens, they will see a modal like this: In the example shown, the program with the *database request has been named “University of Hobbiton” in Settings>Branding>Public Name, if you don’t create a public name for your program the modal will display your program’s name. When will users see the modal? Your logged-in users will only see the modal the first time they run the program, except if the program requires login and they created their GuidedTrack account when trying to run the program.  When will users not see the modal? They will not see the modal if they already allowed your program to access your email address: Explicitly, by typing their email address when they were prompted to the first time that they run your program. Implicitly, by creating a GuidedTrack account when running your program for the first time. What happens someone clicks on “Deny”? If your user clicks on the “Deny” button of the modal, the *database request will throw an error where the reason is “email access denied by user” and the message, “The user denied access to their login email address.” What happens if the user is not logged in? In this case the *database request will also throw an error with the reason “user logged out” and message “The program cannot access the user’s email address because they are logged out.” Remember, you can configure the login settings of your program in Settings>Login.

  Configure a “Reply-to” address You can set up an email address for when your users reply to an email that has been generated within your GuidedTrack program. Go to Settings>Branding and enter the address under Email Reply-to address:

  New functions: .text and .type .text function This function takes any type of variable (number, collection, date, etc) and converts it into text: In this example, the value of oneThirdText is 0.3333333333333333. Look at this code now: Is the value of oneThirdText the same as when using the .text function? Actually, it isn’t! In this case, the value of oneThirdText is 0.33. This is because we are assigning to oneThirdText the display representation of the variable oneThird, which rounds numbers to two decimals.  Use the .text function when you want your text variable to resemble the original variable as much as possible (for example, when you’re sending a number with decimals to Airtable using *service)  and use “{variableName}” for readability (such as when you are displaying a value on the screen). .type function The .type function converts any variable into a text representation of its type.  When you run the code above, the value of typeOfVariable becomes collection. Below is a list of all the variable types with sample code on how to generate them: Variable type Sample variable Variable generation number 3.1416 >>pi = 3.1416 string (a.k.a. text) This is some text >>demoText = “This is some text” collection (a.k.a. array, list) [“apples”,”butter”,”chocolate”] >>shoppingList = [“apples”, “butter”, “chocolate”] association (a.k.a. hash table, dictionary, map) {“Amy”->”12/24″ , “Lucy”->”3/12″} >>bdays = {“Amy” -> “12/24”, “Lucy” -> “3/12”} datetime December 30th, 2020, 10:05 AM >>thisMoment = calendar::now >>thisMoment = calendar::date({ “month” -> 12, “day” -> 30, “year” -> 2020, “hour” -> 10, “minute” -> 05 }) date December 30th, 2020 >>thisMoment = calendar::date >>thisMoment = calendar::date({ “month” -> 12, “day” -> 30, “year” -> 2020}) time 10:11 AM >>thisMoment = calendar::time >>thisMoment = calendar::time({ “hour” -> 10, “minute” -> 11}) duration 5 minutes >>waitTime = 5.minutes >> timeElapsed = calendar::date – calendar::date({ “month” -> 12, “day” -> 30, “year” -> 2020})

   
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  Belen 11:40 am on August 17, 2020 Permalink  

  Feature update – .lowercase, .uppercase, .round a number, find the .minimum and .maximum value in a collection of numbers and more! 

  Here’s what’s new: Text editing: methods to make text uppercase or lowercase, remove spaces around text, URL encode and decode, split text into a collection using a delimiter Round numbers Collections: minimum, maximum and median value of a collection of numbers, remove duplicate elements Check if a value is in the keys of an association Chain methods *service now works with PATCH requests and GET requests accept query parameters in *send

  Text editing We identified some common operations with text variables and we have created methods so that you can use them in a pinch! Here is how they work: UPPERCASE and LOWERCASE You can easily make a text variable all uppercase or lowercase with these new methods: CLEAN This method removes the spaces and any other “whitespace” or blanks such as tabs, carriage return characters or newline characters at the beginning and the end of a text variable: In this example, the value of cleanSongLyrics is “ta da daaaa“. Note that the spaces in between words remain! URL ENCODING Replace unsafe ASCII characters with a “%” followed by two hexadecimal digits to create valid URLs using the method encode with the parameter “URL”.  Here the value of encodedURL is “http://www.cityinfo.com?city=Gen%C3%A8ve&planet=The%20Earth“. Use the method decode(“URL”)  to undo a previous ‘URL encoding’, replacing the ‘%’-based ‘escape sequence’ of characters with their normal representation. SPLIT With split you can turn a text variable into a collection, by selecting a delimiter that you will use to split the variable. In this example, collectionOfFruits is [“pears”,” bananas”,” oranges”,” mangoes”]. Notice that there is a space before the words bananas, oranges and mangoes! If you want to get rid of it, use the “clean” method. The delimiter can have more than one character: Here collectionOfFruits becomes [“pears”,”bananas”,”oranges”,”mangoes”].

  Round numbers Use the round method to round numbers to the nearest integer or to set the number of decimals to display: In the example above, the value of piInteger would be 3, piTwoDecimals, 3.14 and piFourDecimals, 3.1416.

  New methods to work with collections MAXIMUM, MINIMUM AND MEDIAN VALUE If you are working with a collection of numbers, you can easily retrieve the maximum or minimum value in the collection as well as the median: UNIQUE VALUES IN A COLLECTION Use the unique method to get rid of duplicates in a collection: Here citiesVisited becomes [“Amsterdam”, “Madrid”, “London”, “Rome”, “Lisbon”].

  Check if a value is in the keys of an association If you need to check if a certain value is in the keys of an association, you can now use the expresion in – the same way as with collections. Imagine you have an association with people’s phone numbers. You have a user whose name is stored in the variable userName, and you want to ask them for their number only if you don’t have it already: The result of evaluating the expression (something in association) has two possible values: “TRUE” or “FALSE”.

  Chaining methods If you want to apply a method to the result of another method, you can do it in the same line of code! In the example above, the method encode(“URL”) will be applied to the variable urlToEncode and the resulting string will then be made uppercase. The value of encodedUppercaseURL is then “http://WWW.CITYINFO.COM?CITY=GEN%C3%A8VE&PLANET=THE%20EARTH” This other example calculates the median value of a collection of numbers and rounds it to the closest integer:

  *service updates When you are making GET requests, now you can pass query parameters using *send instead of adding them to the path. This is especially useful to send special characters without having to URL-encode them. In this example, the code below will FAIL because of the è in Genève: You can send the parameters creating an association with them, where the key is the name of the parameter and the value is the value you want to send, and using the attribute *send: Also, *service has been updated and now accepts PATCH requests. You can find a detailed case study of using PATCH to update records in Airtable in the manual. Otherwise, check out the documentation of the API service to configure the parameters of your patch request.