Notecard database of library contents?

[Sire Sands]

I've looked at https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Category:LSL_Library and trying to see what's possible.

Our library has content (notecards with text), inside a menu panel, and then the NC is delivered when selected. We'd like to index and make searchable the contents of the notecards, and

perhaps have an index to titles, and click to obtain item. This could be "online," on Internet, or on/in Second Life. So, is there any database search and format option in LSL that would work?

Or hire a developer to build out one for us, from scratch. I've considered Google Sheets relational database, seems not workable for SL content/text. Any help appreciated...

Michael aka DrWeb

[Qie Niangao]

There are some pretty strict limitations on notecards as a medium of communication, regardless of how they're indexed. Depending on the purpose of this library, this may be an opportunity to re-host that content on something less limiting. Perhaps a free blogging platform (such as Wordpress) would offer more flexibility and better management of content updates, etc. Or, depending on the use case, Discord.

Notecards have two superpowers, however:

1. They can contain other full-perm assets, so they can be a handy way to organize and distribute items every potential notecard recipient should be able to access. Note, however, that any notecard containing other content cannot be read by script. Hence any indexing of such notecards would be a tedious manual operation that would need to be repeated any time the notecard is updated.
2. They can be read by a script just by knowing their UUID. It's not necessary to transmit the notecard itself, but rather just communicate its "key" to the reading script, anywhere on the grid. Note that any update to a script creates a new asset with a different UUID, so unless that new key is transmitted to the reader, it will forever read the old version. (Of course, the limitation on #1 applies here: notecards cannot be read by script if they contain any other assets.)

All this said, it would be possible to index a bunch of notecards, either using in-world scripts or external text storage. There's even a relatively new capability to use regular expression matching on LinksetData that could be useful, although of limited capacity per object (which may eventually extend to the more expansive Experience KVP storage).

Obviously, though, external storage can use much more powerful text search than anyone would implement in scripts, and readily access other tools such as built-in translation. It becomes a question of how much of an in-world "handle" on the content is absolutely necessary for the application.