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Having taken the easy way out for the search forms I moved on to formatting the results pages. The appropriate pages are contained in the following directories:
/roads-v2.1/config/multilingual/UK-English/search-views/default/ (for full display) /roads-v2.1/config/multilingual/UK-English/search-views/headlines/ (for brief display)These directories correspond to the 'view' variable attribute passed from my search forms:
<P>| <INPUT TYPE="radio" NAME="view" VALUE="default"> Full Results
<INPUT TYPE="radio" NAME="view" VALUE="headlines" CHECKED> Brief Results | </P>
Once again, if I wanted multiple views I can do this by creating subdirectories in the search-views directory and populating these with 3 files:
I decided to telnet to the server and use pico to edit these files. I did all the editing as super user so as not to change the file permissions or ownership.
Caveat: While configuring my ROADS installation I have done much of the work as super user. If your UNIX experience is limited I'd recommend against this. A safer approach would be to as follows:
In the roads-v2.1 directory as root change the file ownership to nobody all levels down:
chown -R nobody *
su nobody
First I edited the 'header' and 'trailer' files which are used to create the header and footer of your HTML results pages. The 'full' file should contain the layout for one record. This is then repeated to display each of the records in your results set.
I began with the header and trailer for the full display in the ../default/ directory. I created the same look and feel for the head and foot of my results pages as I had for the search screens. I then went on to edit the full file. It became apparent that there is a bug in the version of ROADS I'm using. It has trouble parsing the <@URI> token unless it is the only token on the line so I had to adjust all my files accordingly.
Once I'd completed these to my satisfaction I tackled the 'full' file once again using pico.
Once my three full display files were done I copied them into the ../headlines directory overwriting the existing files. I then edited them to get my brief view.
My brief view used the /roadsv2.1/cgi-bin/tempbyhand.pl script to expand the view from the brief results, so I needed to create files in the /roads-v2.1/config/multilingual/UK-English/tempbyhand-views/default/ directory as well.
When I had finished I had quite a friendly usable interface. ( View some of the files I created.)
Brief and full search results
I moved on to finishing off the various other search response files in the /home/pj/roads-v2.1/config/multilingual/UK-English/search directory; nohits.html, nosearchterm.html and noconnect.html. I recycled my advanced search page for all of these.
Introduction and contents | Previous | Next
Last updated: January 1999 - paul.hollands@bris.ac.uk