Batch editing for Search & Replace by clozach · Pull Request #59 · roam-unofficial/roam-toolkit

clozach · 2020-05-17T21:55:56Z

This PR constitutes a method for batch editing of Roam blocks and a handful of implemented scenarios

Features Demonstrated

Batch linking
Adding/Removing tags at the end of each block
General-purpose search-and-replace (incl. regex!)

Watch a quick demo of the first 2 bullet points here, and a demo pertinent to #35 here. 🤓

Implementation Notes

Making new variants of this workflow is super easy! Just pass a text manipulation function into withHighlightedBlocks.

To make this work, I've added 3 general-purpose functions:

…utils/dom.ts → getHighlightedBlocks() which returns parallel arrays of the currently-highlighted blocks and the content blocks nested therein
…utils/async.ts → forEachAsync() used to simulate async actions on each block
…roam/roam.ts → Roam.replace() which takes a string -> string function as an argument and uses it to flexibly update a node's contents

Known Issues

This PR is a minimum-viable-product implementation of search-and-replace. The ideal UI for this sort of thing would allow each replacement to be reviewed one step at a time, but that would require far more design work.
When implementing the add/remove tag features, I found myself wanting the highlighted nodes to "remain" highlighted after the change. As a result, withHighlightedBlocks does a naive "re-highlighting" after all of the blocks have been processed. Unfortunately, the highlight state appears to be maintained separately within Roam itself, resulting in blocks that remain highlighted even after hitting esc.
- Workarounds:
  - Edit a block, then hit esc to re-syncs the highlight state
  - If the block has a parent, collapsing the parent re-syncs the highlight state for the child
  - But probably you'll just want to reload the page

My hope is that someone smarter than me can find a better way to reestablish the highlights…perhaps by simulating keystrokes? If not, it may be worth deleting batch-editing.ts:106-113

# Batch Linking - Select one or more blocks (full blue highlight…not edit mode) - Press `Meta+shift+l` - Type a word or phrase to batch-convert to [[links]] - Press `Enter` Note: Batch Linking purposefully matches on whole-word boundaries only. This avoides accidentally linking words within other words, so batch-linking `ears` will turn `ears` into `[[ears]]`, but will leave `earshot` alone. This is in contrast to Roam's "Link All" feature, which will happily create a link to your page that looks like this: `[[ears]]hot`. # End Tags - Select one or more blocks (full blue highlight…not edit mode) - Press `Ctrl+shift+t` - Type a word to use as a tag - Press `Enter` The word you typed will be appended to every block, so… • One block • Another block …becomes… • One block #tagged • Another block #tagged # Known bugs - ✅ `tag` appends ` #tag`, but ❌ `urgent tag` appends ` #urgent tag`. - ❌ A number of roam-toolkit behaviors seem to break Undo, and these functions are no exception - ❌ While thse functions preserve the highlighted blocks, making it easy to toggle tags on-and-off, but the highlight is overly-permanent. Workaround: reload the page.

… batch operations

- tag → #tag - compund tag → #[[compound tag]] Note: batch tag removal works with this change out of the box

Stvad · 2020-05-18T01:38:00Z

Thanks! will review soon-ish

Stvad · 2020-05-18T05:52:22Z

First comment from just trying to use it - it should work for current active block too (i.e. if it's in edit mode)

Stvad · 2020-05-18T05:54:16Z

Also the highlighting bug is confusing. If we can't fix it I'd prefer to loose the highlighting rather then to have it

Stvad · 2020-05-18T05:56:30Z

I'm surprised that this breaks undo, other toolkit functions don't seem to.

Stvad · 2020-05-18T05:57:05Z

btw can you elaborate on use-case for add/remove tag at the end?

Stvad · 2020-05-19T02:59:13Z

I think looking at #63 would be useful for figuring out the highlighting stuff

Stvad · 2020-05-19T02:45:48Z

+        const regex = new RegExp(`\\[\\[${text}]]|(\\b${text}\\b)`, 'g')
+        return originalString.replace(regex, function (m, group1) {
+            if (!group1) return m
+            else return `[[${m}]]`
+        })


I think this can be made simpler by using regex like [^\\[]\\b${text}\\b[^\\]] and then just replacing all matches

I tried this…

const regex = new RegExp(`[^\\[]\\b${text}\\b[^\\]]`, 'g') return originalString.replace(regex, `[[${text}]]`)

…and it doesn't work:

Create a Bracket Link.

becomes

Create a[[Bracket Link]]

¯_(ツ)_/¯

Stvad · 2020-05-19T02:46:51Z

+    if (!text || text === '') return
+
+    withHighlightedBlocks(originalString => {
+        if (text.includes(' ')) {


I think there are a bunch of other things just # does not work with. I think it'd be simpler to just always add brackets

Stvad · 2020-05-19T02:48:14Z

+        return
+
+    withHighlightedBlocks(originalString => {
+        const regex = new RegExp(`(.*) (#.*)`)


this does not seem like it would handle newlines?

also if you don't need to use template string/etc the /(.*) (#.*)/ syntax is a bit nicer

I think just doing something like "find last # " and take a substring before that as a result may be simpler here vs using regex

Good potential catch. I tested it out and it actually seems to work fine with newlines, assuming you mean the sort that allow you to add whitespace within a single block (Shift-return on my Mac).

Good point re: template string. I've replaced it with an inlined regex literal. :)

Stvad · 2020-05-19T03:04:01Z

+const withHighlightedBlocks = (mod: { (orig: string): string }) => {
+    const highlighted = getHighlightedBlocks()
+
+    const contentBlocks = Array.from(highlighted.contentBlocks)


shoul getHighlightedBlocks return array straight away?

Stvad · 2020-05-19T03:05:53Z

+        if (!textarea) {
+            console.log("🚨 NO TEXTAREA returned from ", element)
+            return
+        }
+
+        const newText = mod(textarea.value)
+
+        Roam.save(new RoamNode(newText))


There is the apply function that does basically this

Stvad · 2020-05-19T03:06:00Z

+        Keyboard.pressEsc()
+        Keyboard.pressEsc()


also, I'm not sure if this should be responsibility of this function

Stvad · 2020-05-19T03:09:16Z

        this.applyToCurrent(node => node.withCursorAtTheEnd())
    },

+    async replace(element: HTMLElement, mod: { (orig: string): string }) {


so this is basically apply but for HtmlElement instead of current block, I feel like they should follow similar interface (i.e. in terms of RoamNode)

Stvad · 2020-05-19T03:10:06Z

+            // resulting block before Roam has had a chance to
+            // replace the <span> with a <textarea>. Without this,
+            // Batch operations often skip some blocks.
+            await delay(100)


leftClick has additional delay parameter

also is 100 an absolute minimum we can live with?

Stvad · 2020-05-19T03:14:09Z

    return firstChild.querySelector('.roam-block, textarea') as HTMLElement
 }

+export function getHighlightedBlocks(): { parentBlocks: NodeListOf<HTMLElement>, contentBlocks: NodeListOf<HTMLElement> } {


should probably be 2 separate functions

clozach added 5 commits May 17, 2020 14:27

Updated README

477129e

Fix race condition that sometimes causes blocks to get skipped during…

f89a500

… batch operations

Add support for multi-word tags when batch-tagging

0b2fbfb

- tag → #tag - compund tag → #[[compound tag]] Note: batch tag removal works with this change out of the box

Add support for multi-block search-and-replace, includnig regex!

c51faa6

Stvad reviewed May 18, 2020

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Comment thread src/ts/features/batch-editing.ts

Comment thread src/ts/features/batch-editing.ts

Comment thread src/ts/features/batch-editing.ts

Stvad reviewed May 19, 2020

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clozach commented May 17, 2020

Features Demonstrated

Implementation Notes

Known Issues

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Stvad commented May 18, 2020

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