Character Class Module

[swbuza]

See https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...uleset-v-3-3-0

[Callum]

Thanks, swbuza - that's fixed it so I can drag-and-drop the class abilities to the correct place on the character sheet! However, they're still all blank when I open them. Is there something else in the formatting of the xml entries that I need to change?

[swbuza]

I do not know, because I'm not particularly familiar with this module.

What I found most useful was opening a blank campaign, loading no modules, and manually creating a race, a class, and the racial traits and class features of each. Then close FG and open the db.xml with Notepad++ and pay attention to where and how it stores everything.

[Callum]

Thanks for the suggestion, swbuza - I'll do that.

[Wulfang]

Hi Nick,

When I load the module in the Library, I can see it. But none of the information transfers to the NPCs, Races, Classes etc. tabs

Am I missing a step?

[Faelwen]

Hi Nick,

When I load the module in the Library, I can see it. But none of the information transfers to the NPCs, Races, Classes etc. tabs

Am I missing a step?

From the library, what you see is the info inside the <benefit> tag. From the character sheet (class abilities / proficiency / racial traits), you only see what is inside the <text> tag.

From what I can see, unfortunetly, in this module there is no <text> tag. The information will be properly copied during drag-and-drop, but it is just not visible unless it is in the "feat" part of the character sheet :-(

[oldmanpac]

I fixed my copy so that the info would appear, at least for class abilities I didn't test it beyond that. I simply opened the common.xml in wordpad. Used the replace command to replace every instance of "benefit" with "text". Then I went through again, replacing most instances of " text " with " benefit " (note the spaces). There were a few entries where " text " was correct so you have to look at it, but there's not too many. Seems to work.

I tried doing a replace "benefit type" and "/benefit" with "text" equivalents, but that created an error I couldn't figure out. It told me the line, but I didn't see anything wrong.

[Faelwen]

I fixed my copy so that the info would appear, at least for class abilities I didn't test it beyond that. I simply opened the common.xml in wordpad. Used the replace command to replace every instance of "benefit" with "text". Then I went through again, replacing most instances of " text " with " benefit " (note the spaces). There were a few entries where " text " was correct so you have to look at it, but there's not too many. Seems to work.

I tried doing a replace "benefit type" and "/benefit" with "text" equivalents, but that created an error I couldn't figure out. It told me the line, but I didn't see anything wrong.

It's a bit hard to diagnose stuff without the actual error message :-P

Anyhow, this module was created back when you could only drag-and-drop feats onto your character sheet, so the author wrote all his entries as if they were feats rather than class abilities.

About a couple of updates ago (I think?) they also added the possibility to drag-and-drop in the class/proficiency/racial windows.

However feats, class abilities, proficiencies and racial traits each have their own class, and expect to find information in different tags.

• feats will look for relevant information in tags such as <benefit>, <special>, etc.
• class abilities, proficiencies and racial traits expect to find thir information in a <text> tag.

Simply changing <benefit> to <text> might work for drag-and-dropping, but you will lose the ability to read the contents of the entry from the library because the library still thinks the entry is a feat and will try to locate the information in a <benefit> tag.

So you have two possibilities :

1. What I did in my own modules is "cheat" and make my entries act both as feats and class abilities by having both a <benefit> and a <text> tag with the same content. The advantage of this, is that not only can you still read the content from the library, and drag-and-drop from the library onto your sheet, but even from one window of the character sheet to another, and still be able to read the information. So just duplicate <benefit> tags into sibling <text> tags. Since there are thousands of entries in this module, doing this in a notepad will take a while, but programming a little script to do this is fairly easy.
2. The second possibility (which is probably the "cleanest") is to transform all the feat entries of the module into class ability entries. This is quite easy to do in a notepad: you only need to replace "referencefeat" with "referenceclassability", "<benefit" with "<text", and "</benefit" with "</text". I've given it a try just now and it seems to work fine. This solution does however have a downside from the previous one: if you drag-and-drop your entries into the "feats" window rather than the "class abilities" window of your character sheet, you won't be able to read the text because there no longer is a <benefit> tag.

[oldmanpac]

It's a bit hard to diagnose stuff without the actual error message :-P

Anyhow, this module was created back when you could only drag-and-drop feats onto your character sheet, so the author wrote all his entries as if they were feats rather than class abilities.

About a couple of updates ago (I think?) they also added the possibility to drag-and-drop in the class/proficiency/racial windows.

However feats, class abilities, proficiencies and racial traits each have their own class, and expect to find information in different tags.

• feats will look for relevant information in tags such as <benefit>, <special>, etc.
• class abilities, proficiencies and racial traits expect to find thir information in a <text> tag.

Simply changing <benefit> to <text> might work for drag-and-dropping, but you will lose the ability to read the contents of the entry from the library because the library still thinks the entry is a feat and will try to locate the information in a <benefit> tag.

So you have two possibilities :

1. What I did in my own modules is "cheat" and make my entries act both as feats and class abilities by having both a <benefit> and a <text> tag with the same content. The advantage of this, is that not only can you still read the content from the library, and drag-and-drop from the library onto your sheet, but even from one window of the character sheet to another, and still be able to read the information. So just duplicate <benefit> tags into sibling <text> tags. Since there are thousands of entries in this module, doing this in a notepad will take a while, but programming a little script to do this is fairly easy.
2. The second possibility (which is probably the "cleanest") is to transform all the feat entries of the module into class ability entries. This is quite easy to do in a notepad: you only need to replace "referencefeat" with "referenceclassability", "<benefit" with "<text", and "</benefit" with "</text". I've given it a try just now and it seems to work fine. This solution does however have a downside from the previous one: if you drag-and-drop your entries into the "feats" window rather than the "class abilities" window of your character sheet, you won't be able to read the text because there no longer is a <benefit> tag.

The error message was for a failure to read closing tag. I checked the tag and it seemed fine. I did actually change the reference tag, I forgot to mention. I'm not super savvy at this, so I'm just swingin' a hammer. Also probably should leave the module editing for not 2am. My players mostly build outside of FG so if I fix the racial traits they should be none the wiser. Can you expand on making a script to do the duplicating?

[Faelwen]

The error message was for a failure to read closing tag. I checked the tag and it seemed fine. I did actually change the reference tag, I forgot to mention. I'm not super savvy at this, so I'm just swingin' a hammer. Also probably should leave the module editing for not 2am. My players mostly build outside of FG so if I fix the racial traits they should be none the wiser. Can you expand on making a script to do the duplicating?

Most scripting languages have extensions to manipulate XML easily.

For instance in Python with the BeautifulSoup extension, the following script would duplicate all the "benefit" into "text" tags:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import copy

with open("common.xml", 'r') as inputfile:
soup = BeautifulSoup(inputfile.read(), "lxml")

for benefit in soup.find_all("benefit"):
new_item = copy.copy(benefit)
new_item.name = "text"
parent = benefit.parent
parent.append(new_item)

with open("common2.xml", 'w') as outputfile:
outputfile.write(soup.prettify())