[Q] Can app inventor apps write or read text to /from sd card?

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I have been writing an app with app inventor, for my own use but I think it could be of use to others. It is very simple, you type in a cosmetic or a food ingredient name and it tells you all about it (for example if the ingredient has any negative health effects or contraindications).

Currently the app takes an input and essentially does an IF the user typed in "this text" then show them "this text" but that means a lot of IF THEN commands.

I only ever tried BASIC programming and I see that app inventor seems to have no equivalent to a file or write command whereby I could store the database of ingredients on the sd card and search that for information to display to the user.

As it stands the app is nearly five megabytes in size already due to having to store its data internally within the program, is there a way a newb like me could use app inventor to simply search from and display from a text file?

Dave

why don't you use a database (TinyDB) instead of all those IF.

Try looking at this tutorial

http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/learn/tutorials/textgroup2/textgroup2.html

Thank you

I looked into tinydb, I understood it had a limited entry limit and didn't see the page you linked to when searching before so will study that as it looks like what I may need.

I have one question though, I am a newb so excuse me if this is obvious.

I am writing the app using the emulator to test it. As I understand it the tinydb database is only accessible by the app that creates it and so my app will need a routine in it where I can manually enter the data, but then surely each time I test run it I shall have to re enter all that data as apparently the emulator would wipe the database on each re run?

If tinydb cannot store data unless entered from within the program accessing it doesn't that also mean that when packaged the database would be empty until someone typed in data which would defeat the object of it being a searchable database of pre stored data?

Dave

EDIT: According to google developers at googles forum "TinyDB is persistent ONLY when you've packaged and downloaded your app.
When you are developing with the phone connected, and you quit the appinventors app -- or disconnect the phone and restart -- the phone treats that as a completely new application. " which means that the only way to get my data into tinydb file is enter it when packaged and on my phone. But then every user who installed it would have an empty database, so seems canonly use those if then statements after all

I've never used app inventor, so I'm not talking from experience here, but couldn't you package an XML file with the data in it? That way, future updates to the data could simply include an enhance XML file.

Like I said - I don't know app inventor. It's just a thought.

Thanks to the replies here, along with some help and examples at the google groups coffee shop forum, I found the information I need that should enable me to set up a custom tinywebdb database and on first run of the app populate this data from there into a local tinydb database for subsequent use

Dave

If you have a link, Dave, then share it. I need some info on the tinydb too.

I'm in the same boat hear, do you happen to still have a link for any info you obtained on this Dave?

This explains everything:
http://appinventorapi.com/program-an-api-python/