(NOTE: It might be better to rewrite Nini so that a record can span multiple lines. I decided that I want to put ASCII art into a record, and that's hard to do with the line-oriented setup here. The setup might be to start a record with a directive (:record tag1 tag2 ... :) and end it with the next (:record:) or with (:recordend:).)

Why did I write Nini? See my Rationale.

How does this work? See some examples to give you a feel for how Nini works.

How do you install Nini? Here's how.

Note: Nini does not do what ZAPdata does. ZAPdata is a full-blown database engine for creating forms and generating custom reports. Nini was designed to work with scraps of freeform text.

Overview

"Nini" is a plugin script or "recipe" to let you do queries on (more-or-less) freeform data in PmWiki. The basic concept is that you have two pages in PmWiki -- a database page, where you keep your data, and an output page, which is any page you want to display data from your database page.

Your database page

The database page can actually contain a mix of data lines (or "records") and other lines, so you can freely add whatever comments or section breaks you like to the database page.

A data line has two parts: tags in parentheses, at the beginning of the line, and any text after the tags. Nini won't gather data from any line not set up like this.

The text, of course, can contain any markup that you can put into any other line, including formatted text, links, images, and even line breaks (if you use the [[<<]] code). Just be aware that everything has to fit on one line.

When Nini performs a query, it checks the tags of each record. If the record has the right combination of tags, Nini displays the text -- not the tags -- on the output page.

(See SettingUpData for more details.)

Your output page

You "query" for records by opening another page in the editor and adding a (:nini:) directive where you want the data to appear. The directive lets you specify the name of your database page and the tags that each record needs to have before it is displayed on your output page. When you close the editor and view the page, Nini will have inserted into your page some text pulled from your database page.

If you specify one tag, then all records with that tag will appear.
If you specify two tags, then all records with both tags will appear. (Records with only one of the two will not appear.)
If you specify a tag with a tilde in front (e.g., "~books"), then only records that don't have that tag will appear.
If you specify two tags with a vertical bar between them (e.g., "books|music"), then records with one tag or the other (or both) will appear.

(See RetrievingData for more details.)

Stuff I still have to do