Build a Tag cloud

[coasterman]

Hi all,

I have no idea if this is possible or how complex it may become if it is possible.

The idea is to build a tag cloud from from a number of different records which would then appear in a single memo field on a parent form.

the Sub1 form has a control Tagtxt which a user populates with any tags they feel would identify the issue which is described on that record. The business scenario which this database is aimed at may not be very transparent so If I were to use Countries and cities as a demonstration case we might have

Main record Countrytxt = 'England'
Sub record1 Citytxt = 'London' and the CityTagtxt field might contain the words - Buckingham palace Queen Parliament ethinic food centre
Sub record2 Citytxt = 'Coventry' and the CityTagtxt field might contain the words - Blitz Lady Godiva ethic food centre

I'd then like to have a contol globalTagstxt on the Main form to collect unique tags from all the city sub records CityTagtxt.

I can't simply concatenate the values in all in the sub records as of course it would result in many duplicate tag words. I did think if I had a second pop up form linked to Sub1 it could be a continuous form with just 1 field tagtxt visible to the user (obviously there would have to be a FK field to link to the CityID). I could then use the Unique Records property of a new query to create what I needed for the main form.

I guess that would work but visually with another form having to be opened and the words appearing in a continuous form and the user then needing to scroll vertically it gets a bit clunky.

If nobody has any better ideas I'll probably run with the popup form and Unique records suggestion.

Thanks for looking

 

[Uncle Gizmo]

Some Leads for you:-

Done in Outlook
http://ramblings.mcpher.com/Home/excelquirks/json/tagoutlook

Done in Excel
https://www.excelforum.com/excel-programming-vba-macros/680810-create-tag-cloud-in-vba-possible.html

The code examples might give you a leg up with how to approach it.

 

[coasterman]

Thanks for the links. I'm afraid the code examples are far more advanced than my current level of understanding and whilst I don't doubt it would, if I could implement it, be a much more elegant solution than I could come up with I think I would be better sticking to a solution I can maintain and develop.

I've gone with the idea of a popup form to capture user entered tags at child level and then used some code of Allen Brownes to concatenate the values (via a Select Distinct sql query) to arrive at a single unbound txtcontrol on the parent form with all unique tabs from the child level records.

I am now working on a multiple criteria search against the contatentated value but realise I now need to save the output from the contatenate function into a table so I can run the search against it. I'm going to carry on researching that but should anyone look in here and point me in the right direction I'd of course be grateful