Supercard Revisited

This just goes to show that you never know the impact of what you put online or when it might be relevant to someone again. Recently, I was contacted for help with Supercard export, thanks to a blog post I wrote nearly five years ago, back in September 2020.

At the time, I was exporting all of my data from Supercard to “comma separated value” (csv) files, so I could open those in a spreadsheet and then transfer them to a database table in OpenOffice. (I’ve since moved to LibreOffice, but they use the same formats and are essentially different flavors of the same program.) I wrote about the process because I was doing it and writing about it helped me think through what I needed to do, but I didn’t really think that anyone would be able to use it. How many people were using Supercard the way I did, and how many of those would want to move to a different platform?

Four and a half years later, I got an email out of the blue from Miki, a translator who was doing just that. They had started in Hypercard just like I did and migrated to Supercard when Hypercard was discontinued. They had what seems like a huge database of terms related to their translations. I was impressed with the way they described their Supercard stack and what they had been able to build. There was just one problem. Like me, they were working on moving to LiveCode and had hired a consultant to make the transition, but they were having issues exporting their massive amount of data in a usable form.

Miki had found my post, where I had included a screenshot of a snippet of code from my export script. They thought it looked promising, but wondered if I could elaborate. Of course, the reason I left Supercard behind was because of an OS upgrade that made it no longer work on my Mac. So I couldn’t open my projects, and hadn’t saved the full code of my export button to a text file, since I wouldn’t need it once I was done with it. I decided to send the project to Miki, and they were able to open it, share it with their consultant, and after a few email exchanges where I explained what I remembered of my strategy (after seeing the script they were able to send back to me), the consultant wrote a very simple and elegant script to export the data.

I trust they also have a strategy for bringing that data into LiveCode. As I explained to them, part of why my script was complicated was that I was trying to set up spreadsheets that would then work as tables in the relational database. I went from Supercard that acted a little like a database to one that had to actually be organized like one.

That wasn’t hard, but it did mean extracting data a few different ways. For each Place I had submitted my work, I had recorded titles, dates, and responses. For each Title I submitted, I had recorded places, dates, and responses. From that, I had to extract the data to create a table of Submissions. Each submission record would then contain the title, the place, the date, and the status (in/out/accepted/returned). I also had separate stacks for Publishers and Contests, and I wanted to combine those into one table of all Places no matter what type of place they were. I also exported a separate file with the inforation about each Place, but without the information about submissions. And I epxorted a separate file with information about each title that didn’t include the submissions.

There were a number of other things I wanted to change as I made the move from Supercard to a database, and all of that made the export a bit more complicated because I was building out three forms: Submissions, Places, and Titles. I had put all of these actions into one script so that when I flipped the switch, I could get all the data from all of my stacks all at once, creating a snapshop of all my submissions at a single moment in time.

But the main thing that Miki needed help with was how to write data from Supercard to a text file and how to organize that text file in a way that would work for their import. My original script helped with figuring out the Supertalk scripting language for this kind of operation, and I hope my explanation of what I did in the script and why I did it helped them decide what would work for their needs.

I am happy if I helped another translator and glad to be reminded of my old Supercard scripting days. Who knows, maybe it will come in handy again some day. So I don’t lose track of it, I saved the script as a pdf file so I could link to it from this post.