The Wacs Vendor Manager, wacsvendmgr is used in the maintenance of the vendor database which is used by some of the model and set display pages to profer a link back to the original site and heavily in the download infrastructure. It can display, update or create new vendor records in the vendor database. When first invoked, it will offer a choice of vendor sites which have been preloaded into the system using the the console tool vendor table population command, vendors.xml. A number of sample vendor records are distributed in the XML file, vendors.xml which is read by the the section called “The wacspop command” command. This is typically done automatically by the easyinstall command when WACS is installed, or manually if the RPM packages were used.

The Add A New Vendor option gives a simplifed form for the basic details; once created the record should be modified to add whatever extra information is also known. Please contribute details for any good quality sites you know of to the authors to be included in a future version.

Please note that the URLs stored in the vendor database include a number of keywords sandwiched by hash (#) symbols which are substituted for by WACS before calling the described page. The current recognised keywords are:

The Wacs Photographer Manager, wacsphotmgr is used in the maintenance of the photographer database which is used by many of the model and set display pages to profer to work by the same photographer. It can display, update or create new photographer records in the photographer database. When first invoked, it will offer a choice of existing defined photographers, and an option to add a new one. As with vendors, there is a corresponding command line utility called photographers.xml which will import the provided photographers.xml sample collection.

The Wacs Keyword Manager, wacskeywordmgr is used for viewing, adding and amending keyword look-up rules used by the updateinfo command in determining the automatic values for a named set. It does not take any URL arguments, you merely scroll through the list presented, tick the adjacent tick box and then click on Edit or Delete. To add a new keyword, simply click on Add. Scores for each attribute that is infered from the keyword start at 1 for least likely up to 9 for most likely. To investigate how a given set of attributes produced the result it did, set the debug level for tool_updateinfo to something like 5 and the score card used will be displayed.

	Note
	This is new in WACS 0.8.5 - it is not available in previous releases

WACS has two options for how to authenticate users for access to the collection - hostauth which authenticates users by asking the web server host itself and database which uses the user database table within the Wacs database itself. The usual default for Wacs has been to use the hostauth method which works well for both small systems with local users and for bigger systems with distributed authentication like NIS, LDAP or even Active Directory. Where this is not so useful is for commercial sites where all you want your users to access is the WACS-managed collection and nothing else. Here the extra overhead of maintaining a second independant authentication mechanism is a positive boon for security and demarcation.

The wacsusermgr webapp by default creates new users with the next available userid, but if passed a user id on the URL will allow you to edit an existing userid. With this application you can manage user accounts and access rights with reasonable ease.

Tip

What you will notice about wacsusermgr is that some of the functionality is not available - these pieces handle aspects such as address and contact info, automatic sign-up, renewals and referral commissions. The WACS developers do want to see some return on their work and felt the best way to do this was to offer an added value product for the really serious commercial sites and felt the absense of these kind of features was no great loss to the regular free software community - the system is fully functional without it. As a result, a commercial add-on package including the plug-in for wacsusermgr, auto sign-up and customer relationship management features called WacsPro is available through Bevtec Communications Ltd. All the relevant data structures we use are distributed as part of the standard Wacs distribution, so you are at liberty to write your own plug-ins if you wish to. The Wacs developers will even accept and welcome contributions back into the Wacs source tree in this area if people wish to submit them.

	Note
	This is new in WACS 0.8.5 - it is not available in previous releases

This is a straightforward index of the current user accounts along with a link to allow you to edit each of them using wacsusermgr. wacsuserlist is a bit simplistic and has no search features but should be very usuable up to about a hundred users or so. A more advanced version with search, auto-reminder and data analysis features is part of the WacsPro toolkit available as a commercial add on from Bevtec Communications Ltd .

The Wacs Download Manager, wacsdnlmgr allows the resolution of some of the most common problems with download records. To invoke the download manager for download record 1234, call wacsdnlmgr with wacsdnlmgr/download1234.html. The wacsmodelpage will automatically link to this page for users with role “admin” in the access control lists.

This command, introduced in WACS 0.9.1, makes it much easier to create a new set download record. This can either be used to create an identity record which helps with moving sets between installations, or simply to make it easier to unpack sets downloaded from a site that can't be automatically parsed.

This gives an overview of the current state of the download activity over the last two weeks. It's primarily informational although it does link to the download manager to allow modification of the download records.

For some web sites, due to their security measures, it is not possible to perform an automatic download. For these sites, it is possible to have the Wacs download system parse a saved version of the model's index page to compare the set numbers the system knows about with the new version of the page to see if any new sets have been added. If there are new ones found, in most cases the information found is incomplete - mostly it is missing the actual URL (Web Address) for the downloadable zip or movie file - making the download record incomplete. The wacsdnlframe web application splits the web page into two halves - the top half has some input fields; the bottom half has the relevant set page from the site displayed in it.

To make use of wacsdnlframe you find the link to the zip or movie file, do a right mouse click on the link and choose Copy Link Location. You then move up to the input field in the top half of the page, and simply paste the saved URL into it. You then click on the "Complete Download Record" button and the URL for the set is saved into it's download record and the status updated to show that it is now a complete record and usable for a download.

The wacsdnlnext command provides a web-based alternative to the standard command line download tool getarc by creating a web page containing currently pending downloads. It gives both where a set should be saved and a link to each set to be downloaded. It also provides a tick box which can be ticked when each set has been downloaded - it will then check for the presence of the downloaded files and if they're present, mark the download record as pending unpacking.

The recommended sequence for using wacsdnlnext is to select the full pathname where the file should be saved, copy it into the paste buffer, then right click on the link on the archive name and choose Save Link As - in the dialog box that pops up, you then paste the destination directory from the paste buffer. Finally you tick the done box once the download is complete. Once you've done all the downloads you intend to in this batch, you can click on the Update To Do List button at the bottom and the ticked downloads will be checked and if present and of a reasonable size, their download records will be updated to indicate that they have been downloaded.

	Tip
	There is no problem with downloading out of sequence. You can do all the images first for instance and then leave the videos running while you do something else. Just tick the ones you've done and wacsdnlnext will do the rest.