Graphics

Hello all, we have an election coming up, and right now we would have to input all of the information from each election individually, and I was wondering if it is at all possible to have them pull from datalinq, all from one graphic.

So for example on our graphic would it be possible to hook up datalinq to this graphic and then, have it cycle through all of the individual elections we have that night? We run all of the election information through our ticker and have the datalinq hooked up to another graphic, so I know that works. I just need to know if it is at all possible to run all of our elections through this graphic without have a whole bunch of copies of the graphic hooked to different datalinqs. Thank you, for your help in advance.

Hi Justin,

I understand your problem. If you are using the same graphic to show results from different elections, it's indeed a bit silly to have to create duplicates of each scene and change the Datalinq.

However, you will have to do "something".

I don't know how you are processing the results of those different elections, but if the results would all end up in a single Excel-file or in a database, it might be a bit complicated but it could work. If on the other hand, they are all on separate destinations(such as different XML-files) and they are all formatted in the same way, you would use Dynamic URL Datalinq-keys. Have a look at https://www.rossvideo.com/gallery/xpression-u/xpression-datalinq-and-dynamic-urls/ to see how it works.

If you are in the first case you could use dynamic fields inside your Datalinq which could refer to a (hidden) textfield as in the video above.

That textfield could be linked to a list where you could make a selection from within the sequencer.

To give you a very simple example. Imagine you have an Excel where you are putting the results of Election 1 on a sheet whiich is called "Sheet1" and you have a "Sheet2" with the results of the 2nd Election.

In your scene you could have a TextObject which is called "txtSelectedElection" for example to which you have linked a list to hold the predefined values "Sheet1" and "Sheet2". 

That "txtSelectedElection" could be used inside your Datalinq-block to specify from which sheet the data should be pulled from. You could use the value of the textobject to specify which sheet you need just by entering in the table column @txtSelectedElection@. This will get the value from the textobject and replace it in your datalinq-block, making it point to the second sheet instead of the first sheet.

It might seem a bit complicated, but have a look at the above video and hopefully it will make some sense.

I do think you need at least V9 in order to do this but I'm not 100% sure.

Good luck with the elections!