Generating a Lords Daily Sheet at Ping Pong

Process and logic for auto-generating the Lords Daily Sheet at Ping Pong stage

Deciding on the document template to use:

• If there are no published Marshalled Lists for this bill version, then a Daily Sheet document template is used.

• If there are published Marshalled Lists for this bill version, then a Supplementary Sheet document template is used.

Filtering which ping pong motions to include in the list:

Ping pong motions will appear in the Daily Sheet or unnumbered Supplementary Sheet if:

• they were recorded as having been “tabled” up to the specified cut-off date/time of the amendment list,

• they haven’t already got an outcome recorded against them e.g. Agreed to etc.., and

• they haven't already been published on a previous list.

Sorting the ping pong motions

They will be sorted by the amendment number they are associated to (taken from the motion’s context heading)

Populating the list

As part of populating the list – the following insert logic is applied:

1. Take the first sorted ping pong motion and insert an interstitial heading containing that motion’s context (e.g. “COMMONS AMENDMENT 2”)

2. Insert the first sorted ping pong motion followed by any other ping pong motions with the same motion context (hiding their motion contexts so there’s only one interstitial heading before them all)

3. Repeat these steps for remaining sorted ping pong motions with different motion contexts

The ping pong motions and associated ping pong amendments are not numbered.

• If you need to crop this amendment (e.g. if there is more than one ping pong motion to this amendment, which are referring to previous messages in the source amendment like in this real life example ping pong marshalled list https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/41135/documents/145) then carefully select the messages from the source amendment to delete them one-by-one as required using the breadcrumb or structure view.

• If you find you have deleted too much, use Ctrl+z to undo and have another go.

• If you only want a ping pong amendment from the source amendment to appear (see amendment 4D under Motion B, page 4 in the linked Marshalled List above for an example of this scenario) then you cannot simply delete the source amendment as this will delete all its child messages and their child ping pong amendments. Instead:

  1. Delete the quoted structure first by selecting it from the breadcrumb

  2. Use backspace to remove the text (not the element) in the amendment’s instruction and use backspace again to remove the number from the amendment’s num element leaving behind the empty num and empty instruction placeholders. These will not appear in the PDF when it is printed, but means that the child message remains.

  3. Delete the message heading element and the message text element by selecting them from the breadcrumb. Deleting the elements in this case will not delete your ping pong amendment

If you’ve done these previous 3 steps correctly, it will look something like this in the Editor:

• Open

  

If you want to insert an interstitial heading (or any other element) before the first amendment or element in a list, you will need to place you cursor in the 'list body' element.  To do this:

1. Put your cursor at the start of the amendment heading or the first element in your list e.g. “COMMONS AMENDMENT 3”

2. Click on the left arrow on your keyboard and watch the breadcrumb change until you end up in 'list body'

3. Click enter now and select the appropriate element from the insert menu e.g. 'Interstitial heading' and type in the inserted element

The selected element will be inserted before the element at the top of the list. The reason for this manoeuvring of cursor location when inserting the first element in a list is because Lawmaker always inserts your selected element after the element that your cursor is in. The only way to insert something as the first item in a list, is to shift the cursor so that it’s in an element before the element at the start of the list.