Chapter 17. 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. It can also take additional arguments including order, sample and limit. The order argument can be either order=F for a conventional forward sort, ie A-Z or 0-9, or order=R for a reverse sort, ie Z-A or 9-0. The primary point of this is to use for galleries where it can be used to put the highest numbered, ie latest, galleries first on the list. The sample argument selects how it should select the highlighted images; the options are sample=R for a random sample, sample=L for the latest additions to be shown, or sample=H for the highest rated sets to be shown.

[Note]Note

sample=H is silently ignored for models at this point because it would require excessive additional database activity to calculate.

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The limit argument is used to reduce the number of subareas featured takes the form of limit=5 which would limit wacsshow to five areas. You can combine these to form something like: wacsshow/sarea=redheads:order=R:sample=H:limit=5 which would show the latest five galleries in the areas redheads, select the sample images from the very highest rated sets and show just five galleries.

Wacsshow's behaviour is significantly 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.