Of course in order to do this, you will need to add in details of your
account for any existing vendor, or add details of a new vendor you wish
to download from. For an existing supported vendor, you will merely need
to call up the vendor manager, wacsvendmgr; select the preloaded vendor
details and modify the database entry. This will mean changing subscribed
to "Yes" and adding your username and password - the subscribed until field
is purely informational at the moment, but may be useful to you. Once this
is done, click on the [Update Database] button and the changes will be made
for you.
The refresh command
The refresh command is a front end to the chkmodel command which goes
through all the idmap entries for currently subscribed-to web sites and
then calls chkmodel as appropriate. It takes one optional command line
argument which causes it to check all models (either -a or --all depending
on which style you prefer). At present it has a fairly simplistic algorithmn
for assessing whether a model is currently active or not - if there's been
more than a month during which her page has been checked and nothing new
found, she is considered dormant. Unless the -a option is used, dormant
models are not rechecked daily.
If you wish to do an automatic update system using crontab, you probably
want to call refresh normally once per night, and refresh -a
once per week at a suitably quiet time.
The getarc command
The getarc command reads through the outstanding download requests and
picks a small number of them to go after. It downloads each in turn and
places them into the download area of the wacs system, in a sub-directory
for the source web site, and then sub-directory of that called either zips
for image file zips, or videos for video files. Within these it creates a
further sub-directory of the model's name, an underscore and her reference
number to avoid confusion with multiple model of the same name. Inside this
directory, it places the files it has downloaded.
Notes on configuring the Downloader
If you're using a pre-defined site record for the Vendor site you wish to
download from, you should have an easy time; just enable the site, add your
password, and then add a few model details using the Wacs Model Manager and
it should all start working. If you're creating a new Vendor site
description, it can be rather more difficult. The first thing you need to
understand is how to set the Image and Video download id types to the
correct values (vidtimg and vidtvid in the
vendor schema). The actions take place in two places - first the
chkmodel script must actually find the desired zip or video file name and
create a download record requesting it be fetched. Second, the getarc
script must actually perform the necessary retrieval and saving actions.
The following table details how the various values currently work:
| Image Sets | |
|---|---|
| 1 | Default - just get the URL specified in the download record modulo the addition of the specified image server URL if the download record URL doesn't start with http:// |
| Video Clips | |
| 1 | Default - just get the URL specified in the download record modulo the addition of the specified video server URL if the download record URL doesn't start with http:// |
| 2 | Adds the model id (usually the ikey) on the front to avoid clashes with duplicate file names. |