LawMaker Release Notes
8/27/2005
Be sure to run the LMInstall program in order to register the new objects. No DB schema update
is required.
Special Business ID’s
I added the new business ID identifiers that Judy B sent me last spring (1011 = UB, 1012 = TBL, etc.)
Automatic Amendment Letter Assignment
There was a problem with the automatic assignment of amendment letters when importing the 28th one
from the LDR. This has been corrected (I think – please verify).
New Search Fields
I’ve added several new search fields. These are documented under the Search object in the “Writing
LawMaker Scripts” guide. Here’s a summary of the new ones:
Detail 2 Subject
Major Index Entry
Minor Index Entry
Detail 1 Index Entry
Detail 2 Index Entry
Any Index Entry
Major Index Entry (House)
Minor Index Entry (House)
Detail 1 Index Entry (House)
Detail 2 Index Entry (House)
Any Index Entry (House)
Major Index Entry (Senate)
Minor Index Entry (Senate)
Detail 1 Index Entry (Senate)
Detail 2 Index Entry (Senate)
Any Index Entry (Senate)
Most of these add searching capabilities for index entries. These are needed by the index generation
scripts.
Scripting Object Changes and Additions
IndexEntries and Subjects collections – Added the methods Add and Delete so that a script can
add or delete index entries and subjects to a LegislativeItem object.
IndexEntry and Subject – Made the Broad, Major, Minor, and Detail properties read/write.
Also added a Detail2 property. Scripts can now update index entries and subjects.
PageNumbers – This is a new object type, which is a collection of PageNumber objects
associated with a LegislativeItem object. You can add page numbers to this collection from a
script.
PageNumber – This is a new object type representing a page number (or range of page
numbers). The properties include DocumentType (1 = journal, 2 = record), StartPage, EndPage,
11/26/11 Page 1
Annotation (“RC” or “RM”), and Reference (which can be what the annotation is referring to,
such as the roll-call number). All of these properties are read-write.
LegislativeItem – Added a property called IndexEntries, which returns the collection of index
entries for a LegislativeItem object. Also added a property called PageNumbers, which returns
the collection of page numbers for a legislative item.
IndexSearch – This is a new object type that lets you do searches using index values. For
example, you can get a list of all “Detail1” values for an index entry with the Major value equal
to “Abuse”, and Minor value equal to “Child”, as shown below:
set srch = CreateObject ("LawMaker.IndexSearch")
srch.Execute "Senate", "Abuse", "Child"
for I = 1 to srch.NumMatches
Selection.TypeText srch.Match(I)
Selection.TypeParagraph
next
Member Setup
I made the “Jr/Sr” field editable so that you can type in something other than “Jr” or “Sr” (e.g., “III”).
Example Index Script
I’m including an example index script called IndexTest.vbs. You will need the document template file
called SenateIndex.dot, which I’m also including. Add a report to Bill Management that executes this
script. It does not require any user parameters. It will produce the Senate index for the journal.
Before running the script, be sure to migrate the subjects over to the index by selecting “Copy All
Subjects to Index” from the Tools menu (only one person should do this, if you haven’t done it already).
Also, assign some page numbers to your legislative items. For testing purposes, just do a few.
The output of the script is in Example Senate Journal Index.doc (just the first few entries, and there
aren’t many page numbers). It’s pretty close to the example that I got from Judi a long time ago.
11/26/11 Page 2