Case Management

Displaying Notes in Daylite

June 23, 2008 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

While setting up some merge templates in Pages, I got an email from Andy Warwick, a web designer/programmer in England, who developed a great widget for Daylite. His widget allows you to display a running list of notes in Contacts or Projects (and some other database objects). It only displays those notes which have the string “{HUD}” in the title. Apparently, a lot of people don’t want to see every note they make on a particular contact or project.

While Daylite allows you to create notes linked to a contact or project and gives you a list of note titles in an Activity tab, you still have to click on each note to see its content. With Andy’s widget, every note with “HUD” in the title is displayed, along with its content, in a running list. (The widget strips out the “HUD” string so the titles don’t include “HUD” in them.) It’s easy to scroll through your notes (or search for them using Daylite’ global search feature–Sh + Cmd + F.)

In my practice, we have a chronological list of ALL notes related to a particular contact or client using Timematters. I wanted to emulate this feature in Daylite and tweaked Andy’s widget to display every note. I also changed the formatting a little bit. Of course, if you want to show only a subset of your notes, Andy’s widget is just the ticket.

Here’s a screenshot to show you what the display looks like:

You can edit any note by clicking the Edit button of that particular note. I’d like to be able to add the initials of the note’s author to the title line, but haven’t had time to work on it.

So why did Andy email me? Well, I’d sent him the new code to show all widgets, but not being a programmer, there were some things that I thought would make the code better but didn’t know how to do. Andy kindly replied with a better section of code which I’ve incorporated into the final widget. The widget is available for download here. (Right click the link to download. Then unzip and double click the file to install in Daylite.)

Two caveats: First, the widget will choke if you use quotation marks in the content of your note. Nothing gets displayed if there’s a quotation mark in any of the notes. Second, there’s a bug in Daylite that causes the scroll bar to freeze when a list in the HUD is longer than the HUD area itself. Just drag the corner of the window a little to resize and the scroll bar unfreezes.