Migrate the data table:Modules?

Getting Started Newbie Questions
#1

I’m trying to migrate my data table to an external module. 

It’s working just fine as is but I will be adding a lot of data later on. 

So ideally i would like to separate the data table so I can just modify the data table without touching other elements in main.lua by mistake. 

 

I believe this is a job for a module (separate .lua file, as I understand) but I can’t figure out how to achieve this. There are some tutorials/ documentations but some of them say they are outdated. So I’m not sure where to start. 

 

Currently my data table looks something like this; 

 

local Data ={}

Data[1].name = “AAAA”

Data[1].detail = “BBBB”

Data[2].name = “CCCC”

Data[2].detail = “DDDD”

 

Data[3].name = “EEEE”

Data[3].detail = “FFFF”

 

 

And I would like to … 

-A ) migrate the Data={} data table to another .lua file

while  

-B ) the variable “Data” and individual data items are still accessible from main.lua 

Thaks!

Leo 

#2

This should work:

-- data.lua local Data = {} Data[1] = {} Data[1].name = "AAAA" Data[1].detail = "BBBB" Data[2] = {} Data[2].name = "CCCC" Data[2].detail = "DDDD" Data[3] = {} Data[3].name = "EEEE" Data[3].detail = "FFFF" return Data -- main.lua data = require( "data" ) -- note: drop the ".lua" extension here print( data[1].name ) print( data[1].detail )

Another option would be to put the table into JSON-format (or XML), then read/parse that file into a lua table (this might make it easier if you want to change the data later, without having to rebuild the app).

#3

Thank you Jedi. It worked like magic. 

This module method is perfectly fine for now. But eventually, I will be updating the data table frequently. So I will explore JSON format as well. 

#4

This should work:

-- data.lua local Data = {} Data[1] = {} Data[1].name = "AAAA" Data[1].detail = "BBBB" Data[2] = {} Data[2].name = "CCCC" Data[2].detail = "DDDD" Data[3] = {} Data[3].name = "EEEE" Data[3].detail = "FFFF" return Data -- main.lua data = require( "data" ) -- note: drop the ".lua" extension here print( data[1].name ) print( data[1].detail )

Another option would be to put the table into JSON-format (or XML), then read/parse that file into a lua table (this might make it easier if you want to change the data later, without having to rebuild the app).

#5

Thank you Jedi. It worked like magic. 

This module method is perfectly fine for now. But eventually, I will be updating the data table frequently. So I will explore JSON format as well.