Database-type data but without a server?

[Sarah Reichelt]

On Thursday, April 4, 2002, at 04:22  pm, Barry Levine wrote:

> I'm making an educational "math game" that will have a series of 
> multiple choice questions. <snip>

Rev makes reading & writing text files very fast and very easy so this 
approach sounds reasonable to me. What about having a text file with a 
single line for each question & it's answers, separated by some 
delimiter (I've used commas in my example but if they are ever likely to 
appear in the data, you'll need to choose something else).
e.g.
	4 x 2,6,8,10,3
	10 / 2,3,5,7,9 etc etc

Read the file in all in one go and store it in a hidden field or custom 
property. Then as the student answers, store their result in another 
hidden field ready for collating, saving & printing when they've 
finished. One of the neat things that Rev has over HyperCard is the 
ability to have a separate name & label for a button, meaning that you 
can have buttons called "answer 1", "answer 2" etc but set their labels 
to whatever the answer is for that particular question.

>
> A follow-on to the above question is how the "student test results" 
> data files can be processed in a report. Is there some kind of field 
> or, perhaps, a group of fields that would permit me to "pretty-print" a 
> report? I suppose simply processing all of the student test results 
> files using a script in Rev and then sending it out to a tab-delimited 
> file one could open in Excel is an acceptable solution. However, it 
> would be nice to keep everything happening within the Rev environment.
Use a tab-delimited field to layout your report - in the latest version 
of Rev (1.1.1b2), this will keep the formatting during printing and can 
be adjusted to make a very neat printout. While testing, have the 
vertical grid showing - this makes it easier to check.

I hope this is helpful.
Sarah