With the latest version of the GoFiler family of products, the ability to natively read JSON files has been added to Legato. In this week’s blog, we will discuss the new JSON functions and how they can be used. Keep in mind that you must be using version 5.3a or later of GoFiler or version 1.2i of Legato Basic in order to run the examples from this blog. Also this blog explores some very basic Javascript; knowledge of Javascript may be helpful.

For this week’s blog post we are going to discuss tracking elapsed time in Legato. Like many things in Legato, there are a number of different ways to accomplish this task, each with their pros and cons. Many of these functions have appeared in other scripts we’ve previously posted but this article will be a more in-depth look at these functions.

A very common scenario for a script is to get a file from a user, perform several actions on it and then save the file. As developers it is easy to fall into the “user is always correct” trap. We assume that if we are asking for an HTML file, the user is going to give us one. Whether the user does it on purpose or not, sometimes this isn’t the case and we, as developers, should be prepared for this use case. This blog is going to discuss how we can validate files we receive from the user.

This week’s blog post is going to focus on Legato’s ability to sort and search tables and lists. Many times when developing, you need to collect up a list or table of data and perform operations or analysis on that data. When analysis is involved it usually means finding specific entries in the list or table. As the data set grows this search can start to get very expensive. I’ve created a script to show how searching lists and tables can impact your script performance.

This weeks’s blog is going to focus on the File Transport Protocol or FTP and what functions Legato offers to add FTP into your next script. The FTP protocol is an older protocol and somewhat outdated but it does have its uses. It was originally designed to send files over the internet long before webpages and HTTP. It has many disadvantages when compared to modern protocols such as SFTP but it still offers an easy way for users to download and upload files.

Previously, I discussed converting a CSV file into a HTML table using Legato’s HTML Writer Object. The previous blog, which you can find here, did not cover all the options and functions the HTML Writer Object offers. This week’s blog will be an overview of the functions for the HTML Writer Object and what they can do.

When writing a script sometimes it is hard to find the function you need. In Legato there are multiple ways to search for functions, including the help system and the Function Select function on the Script ribbon. This blog is going to cover the Function Select function in the Legato IDE as well as an overview of some of the other Legato editing functions available within the application.

While Legato offers its own method of storing settings, sometimes a script will need to be able to read the settings of other applications. This includes applications that use the registry to store information. The Windows Registry is a database that is managed by the operating system that all applications, drivers, services, and other processes can use to store settings and other information. The registry was originally introduced as a common place for applications to store settings since INI files did not work well in a multi-user environment. With later versions of Windows, it became easier for applications to store INI or XML settings in a user’s profile, but some applications still use the registry as it offers some unique features. This week’s blog will be a discussion of the registry functions in Legato as well as some common pitfalls programmers may encounter when using the registry.

This week’s blog post is going to be an example of using Legato to analyze a directory and a csv file, and to update a database with the results. While this script is specialized for a personal website and may have a lot of practical application outside of similar websites, it showcases many of the concepts I want to cover in this blog and illustrates the ability of Legato to bring data together.

If you have ever wanted to format data from a database into a web format then you have experienced the added difficulty of working with HTML. For this week’s blog we are going to be taking a look at Legato’s HTML Writer object. This object allows us to create HTML coding with very little knowledge of HTML but allows us access to some advanced features of HTML like CSS. In order to show the HTML Writer object, we will convert a CSV file to HTML but the data source could easily be adapted to any file format or database.

Many times we developers download tools and updates to specifications in zip files. Figuring out which files have changed between versions can be a pain. For this blog, we are going to create a simple script to help compare the contents of two different zip files. Instead of having to check all the files, you can run this script and have it print a list of the files that need to be reviewed.

This week we will add a few more features to the bulk filing script. Now that Steve has filled in the code to create a bulk filing we can add the finishing touches to increase performance, check that the filing size is within acceptable limits, and improve the user interface. If you haven’t read the previous posts, here are the links to part one and two.

For this week’s blog post we are going to start creating a script that will allow users to create a bulk filing for submission to EDGAR. In order to accomplish this we are going to split the blog into three parts: interface, project file processing, and finally the submission creation. Since this is the first blog in the series we are going to start with the interface.

Sorting pictures can be a time consuming task. Many devices such as cell phones and cameras save pictures with sequential numbers. While this is great because we, as the users, don’t need to name our photos as we take them. However, it does mean that sorting the resulting photos can be time consuming. Luckily we can use Legato to create a basic sorting interface. Unlike many of the scripts in this blog this script is intentionally incomplete. It is a basic framework in which you can build your own image processing. You could edit the script to move all of the images into folders based on the specified names. This would sort the pictures into events or groups. You could also edit the script to run a program on the images with names. You could create thumbnails of named images. There are many possibilities including reworking the script to work with more than images.

A little while back I wrote a few blogs on the possibilities of background threads in Legato. For this week we are going to discuss using a Legato background thread to monitor the SEC’s RSS feed of filings. The script checks the SEC’s RSS feed and if a specific CIK is found in the feed, a message box showing the filing information is opened. This script could be adapted to work with any RSS feed, but as it stands the script can help you see when your company’s filings are disseminated to the public.