* Because I can’t get the long-press on touch screens to work inside the listboxes, and my potential work-around isn’t working to my satisfaction, I have currently made it so that double-clicking the title area (above the sub-heads, because those do OrderBy) of the character list in Compact and Classic view will call up the context menu for that list–IF you have selected items in the list box.

* Addressed font scaling issue in Advanced Edit display grid.

* GCA should now create a default library on startup if none exists.

* Addressed misplaced options button issue in Portrait box.

* The Protection box will no longer display information when no character is loaded.

* Updated the handling of some things in the Colors & Layout dialog.

* Overhauled the look of the Options window.

* Added a ‘Getting Started’ box to the Compact view, which offers some suggestions as to what to do once GCA has started up. This only displays if no character is loaded.

* Added support for a displaynameformula() tag. When using the DisplayName property of a Trait (which most trait lists inside GCA use), if displaynameformula() exists, GCA will use that to generate the name beging returned, instead of the built-in functions. In conjunction, the BaseDisplayName() function, or “me::basedisplayname” will return the same info as DisplayName, but will not use the formula, so it can be used within formulas to alter the output that GCA would have generated.

* Added functions to Solver:

@Len(<text>) returns the length of the given text.
@EndsWith(<text>, <check value>) returns 1 if <text> ends with <check value>, 0 if not. Case is ignored.
@StartsWith(<text>, <check value>) returns 1 if <text> starts with <check value>, 0 if not. Case is ignored.

@EndsWith and @StartsWith both use a few specialty variables instead of a few characters that GCA uses internally for parsing purposes. So, if you want to check for parens (), braces {}, or quotes “, you should instead use these variables as needed: %closeparen, %openparen, %closebrace, %openbrace, %quotes.

* Added to Text Function Solver:

$InsertInto( <target string>, <insert string>, <at position> ) which puts some text inside other text.

* The special case substitution $val() has been added to the Text Function Solver. This is identical in function to $textvalue(), just shorter.

* GCA will now support defining variables at the trait level. Variables are defined using the vars() tag, with the format vars(<name1>=<value1> [, <name2>=<value2>] [, <more name value pairs as needed>]). This allows for greatly reducing the complexity of certain types of formulas, such as the new displaynameformula() mentioned above. These are simple substitution variables; if you use vars(%name% = me::name), then the %name% variable stores the text “me::name”, not the actual name of the trait.

For example, to create a DisplayName that uses the same name that GCA would generate, but adds additional text of “Bonus Text” *within* the parenthetical information (if any), the straight formula might look like this:

displaynameformula($if(@endswith($val(me::basedisplayname), %closeparen) then $insertinto($val(me::basedisplayname), “; Bonus Text”, @len($val(me::basedisplayname))-1) else “(Bonus Text)” ))

Notice that we have to keep repeating the ‘$val(me::basedisplayname)’ bit over and over again (And $val() is necessary, because the Text Function Solver won’t replace any value references unless explicitly told to do so with the $val() or $textvalue() functions). And imagine the additional complexity if we wanted to include a trait value or tag reference instead of the simple constant “Bonus Text”.

So, we can simplify with a variable:

vars(%name% = $val(me::basedisplayname))

and the new displaynameformula() that makes use of it:

displaynameformula($if(@endswith(%name%, %closeparen) then $insertinto(%name%, “; Bonus Text”, @len(%name%)-1) else “%name% (Bonus Text)” ))

In this case, not drastically shorter as text goes, but much more readable.

Note that because GCA will replace the variable name indiscriminately within the target area, as the first step of evaluating an expression, you should ensure that your variable names are unlikely to conflict with other types of text. I recommend using a percent sign % at the beginning and end of each variable name, to ensure no accidents are likely to occur.

* It’s now possible to copy one or more tag/value pairs from inside the Advanced Edit window as an XML fragment, and to paste that fragment into another Advanced Edit window, in order to copy specific tags from one trait to another. To copy tags, select each of the tags you want to copy in the grid, then press CTRL+SHIFT+C to copy them (CTRL+C just copies the text value of those cells). You’ll now have an XML fragment which you can paste anywhere that accepts text. To paste such a fragment into GCA as tags, click on the edit grid in Advanced Edit to ensure that it’s active (but you don’t want to be editing a value, or the paste will go into that field as text), then press CTRL+V to insert the tags.