Chapter 15. WACS Web Apps: Presentation

Table of Contents

Presentation Applications
wacsnewmodels
wacsnewsets
wacsnewvideo
wacsshow
wacsvidshow
wacsslideshow
wacsfp

Presentation Applications

wacsnewmodels

wacsnewmodels lists models recently added to the database - it extends it's definition of newly added dynamically from two weeks up to two years in two week increments until it has found more than six new models.

wacsnewsets

wacsnewsets lists sets recently added to the database. Optionally takes an argument of a date from which to work back - this function is used by the previous week link at the bottom of the normal page but can actually take any arbitary date. To do this for the week backwards from the 21st September 2006, this would be called with wacsnewsets/21-SEP-2006. [NB: this is currently assumed to be native date format of the database, ie 21-SEP-2006 for Oracle or 2006-09-21 for MySQL; one would hope that other SQL implementations would at least accept dates in one of these formats.]

It also includes a facility to import all of the new sets for the week concerned into a tag set for subsequent perusal. To do this, you need to select a tag set number which has not been used before, unless you wish to append the new items to this tag set. If you select tag set 599, to copy all new sets this week into this you call wacsnewsets with wacsnewsets/T599. It is also possible to create a tag group of those sets that were new at a previous date; for the 8th September 2006 into tage set 597, you would call wacsnewsets with wacsnewsets/T597=08-SEP-2006.

wacsnewvideo

wacsnewvideo is same code and features as wacsnewsets, just with the control variable changed so it features video clips instead of image sets. All the same features and options are supported.

wacsshow

wacsshow makes a pretty index of the categories for a given sarea including a few items from each area taken at random. For example to browse the section redheads, you would invoke wacsshow with wacsshow/sarea=redheads. While wacsshow does not take any other options, it's behaviour is controlled by the precedence section of the WACS configuration file. In this a default precedence can be set to either models or sets; it can also be overriden per specific sarea. So you might set your default precidence to sets, but decide that for the sarea redheads you would override this to models. Thus when looking at some other area, such as maybe "usenet" for general stuff downloaded off the net where each set is not necessarily linked with any model, it shows you a selection from the sets within that section. However when you look in "redheads", it will instead show you the model icons of those models with sets featured under this section. For more information on configuring this behaviour, please see the bit about configuring precedence in the config section.

wacsvidshow

wacsvidshow - the video version of wacsshow - options as above.

wacsslideshow

wacsslideshow runs a web-based slide show of a set. Sometimes more convenient than downloading a zip is to watch a slideshow online. This functionality is provided by wacsslideshow, to invoke basically just call with the set number, for instance for set123 call it with wacsslideshow/set123. It can also support the display of a tag set or connection set in a similar fashion, merely invoke with tag and the relevant (set-based) tag number, for instance to see all sets in tag504 call it with wacsslideshow/tag504. For a connection, invoke it with conn and the connection number, as in wacsslideshow/conn10 to show connection 10 as a slide show. To do a slideshow of all a model's sets, you can use either mod or model followed by the model number, eg call it with wacsslideshow/model1234 to show all of model no 1234's sets.

wacsfp

wacsfp is the standard front page of the WACS system. It doesn't take any options at this time, but offers dynamically generated, context sensitive pulldown menus on top of a selection of random suggestions and useful links allowing a wide range of access around the entire Wacs system.