This electronic book, the WACS Programming Guide, is designed to act both as an introduction to programming with the WACS API in either perl or PHP, and as a reference volume for both the API itself and the database schema. This book assumes you already have a basic knowledge of programming in your choosen language (PHP5 or perl5) and have some understanding of databases and in particular SQL (Structure Query Language). Some familiarity with WACS at a user level would also be a distinct advantage, and I'd strongly recommend working through the companion user guide first - who knows it might give you some ideas about neat extra features you can add to your own site. All documentation for WACS is available both within the distribution and from the WACS Web Site at Sourceforge.net.

It is important to stress that ALL of the collection management tools are implemented in Perl and the PHP interface is an optional addition to, not an alternative to, the core Wacs system which is perl based. Given the relative youth of the WACS system, php5 has been selected for the implementation to save future porting efforts as it is expected that php5 or later will be the minimum common standard by the time Wacs reaches 1.0. There is no intention to support older dialects of php at this point.

As the WACS software package is Open Source, we're always looking for contributions; if you create a site design (or prototype for one) which you don't end up using, maybe you would consider donating it to the repository of sample WACS Skins. We can always substitute our own artwork into already written web application code.

For copyright/licensing reasons, the example images feature sets from photoshoots by the main developer of WACS (Beaky) and a friend of his. These sets are available for download from the WACS demonstration site at PinkMetallic.com - CAUTION: contains adult material! Access to this site is currently free but we may have to levy a small charge in the future if refferal and donations don't reach the hoped-for amount.

The very first step is to import the WACS API modules into your program file along with those standard modules needed to access the database. These files should be in the right location already and should just be found without any additional specification of where they are.

require_once "wacs.php";

$wacs = new Wacs;

The same code segment implemented in perl looks like:

use Wacs;
use DBI;

	Tip
	The PHP interface requires an Object Handle to use when accessing the WACS module which we're simply calling $wacs. Perl doesn't need such a construct - there is simply the one instance.

You will note that in Perl we import a database abstraction library called DBI that allows us to make connections to and ask questions of an external relational database. In Php there is a very similar system available called PDO (Php Data Objects) but it is normally included by default and is installed as a part of the language itself using the extensions mechanism.

	Note
	In past times, we used to use an external module called DB.php but this had become unreliable and we have re-written all the code to use PDO. You might still find occasional examples that reference it.

The second step is to read the standard WACS configuration file to find out where everything is, and then check that this user is allowed to access the WACS system. This is a two step process, and the reading of the configuration file must be done first; otherwise WACS doesn't know where to look for the security files it needs to determine whether this user should be given access or not.

// read the Wacs configuration files
$wacs->read_conf();

// check the auth(entication and authorisation) of this user
$wacs->check_auth( $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'], 1 );

and here is the same thing again in the perl dialect:

# read the Wacs configuration files
read_conf;

# check the auth(entication and authorisation) of this user
check_auth( $ENV{"REMOTE_ADDR"}, 1 );

The third step is to initialise the database connection. Since some databases require an environment variable to determine where their configuration files have been stored, this needs to be set first. Wacs provides for this and this code will create that environment variable, if needed, and then proceed to establish the database connection itself.

// database initialisation
// - establish environment variable
$dbienv = $wacs->conf_get_attr("database","dbienvvar");
if( ! empty( $dbienv ))
{
        putenv($dbienv."=".$wacs->conf_get_attr("database","dbienvvalue"));
}
// - connect to the database
try {
       $dbhandle= new PDO(
                 $wacs->conf_get_attr("database","phppdoconnect"),
                 $wacs->conf_get_attr("database","dbuser"),
                 $wacs->conf_get_attr("database","dbpass") );
}
catch( PDOException $e )
{
        die("Can't connect to database\nReason:".$e->getMessage."\n");
}

and here's how we do it in perl:

# database initialisation
# - establish environment variable
$dbienv = conf_get_attr( "database","dbienvvar" );
if( $dbienv ne "" )
{
        $ENV{$dbienv}= conf_get_attr( "database","dbienvvalue" );
}
# - connect to the database
$dbhandle=DBI->connect( conf_get_attr("database","dbiconnect"),
                        conf_get_attr("database","dbuser"),
                        conf_get_attr("database","dbpass") ) ||
die("Can't connect to database\nReason given was $DBI::errstr\n");

OK, let's just study this code for a moment. It first calls the WACS API function conf_get_attr with the section parameter of database as it wants database related configuration information, and an argument of dbienvvar. The WACS API function conf_get_attr is short for configuration get attribute and returns the value of the configuration file parameter of that name or it's default value. The dbienvvar means database interface environment variable. A typical value for this might be something like ORACLE_HOME which is the environment variable that Oracle 10g and 11i requires to be set in order to find it's current configuration.

The next line of the code checks to see if we got back an actual variable name (eg ORACLE_HOME) or an empty string (ie nothing). If we were given a valid variable name, then we're going to need to set it the value it should be, which again we can get from the configuration file, this time called dbienvvalue which is short for database interface environment value (as distinct from the variable name we just looked up). A likely value for this might be /usr/local/oracle. Obviously if we're given no variable name to set, there's no point looking for a value for it! Conversely we are assuming that having bothered to name the variable in the configuration file, also put in a valid value for it - this code could break if the variable name is specified but not it's value.

The second section of these code segments is to do with the establishment of a connection to the database and is a little different between the two versions. Both systems use a handle for the database connection, which we call $dbhandle - imaginative name huh? In both cases the respective database APIs provide a way to open the connection to the database and return us the handle we will use for future actions. In the Php case, we create a new object of type PDO with the necessary three parameters to make the connection. In Perl we simply call the DBI connect function with those same three pieces of information.

These three pieces are: the database specification, the username and finally the password. The configuration file knows these as phppdoconnect or dbiconnect, dbuser and dbpass respectively.

The final bit copes with putting out some kind of error message, at least showing the point of failure, if we are unable to establish a connection to the database. The methods are very slightly different, but the effect is very much the same between the two versions.

	Tip
	Note that you might wish to have completed the output of the HTML header section and started the body by this point so that should the database connection fail, the error message will be visible. We will show you how to present the error to the user in a better way later on.

The next step in the process is to use the database connection we've established to actually make a request of the database. For now don't worry about what that request is or how we've written it - we'll come back to that topic in detail later in this chapter.

Look at the mechanics of how we're issuing the request and getting back the results. What we're going to ask the database for is a list of those girls who are marked as Favourite Solo models. We chose this because all three of the models in our current samples directory are marked as this and so even if you only have our sample records loaded, you should find some matches.

// do db select
//                0      1        2          3
$query = "select mname, modelno, mbigimage, mimage from ".
         $wacs->conf_get_attr("tables","models").
         " where mflag = 'S' order by mname";
$cursor = $dbhandle->prepare( $query );
$cursor->execute();

And the perl version pretty much the same:

# do db select
#                 0      1        2          3
$query = "select mname, modelno, mbigimage, mimage from ".
          conf_get_attr("tables","models").
          " where mflag = 'S' order by mname";
$cursor = $dbhandle->prepare( $query );
$cursor->execute;

In both cases we're putting together an SQL query that reads:

select mname, modelno, mbigimage, mimage
from models
where mflag = 'S'
order by mname

This query asks the database to fetch the four named items: mname, modelno, mbigimage, and mimage from the database table called models where the field mflag has a value of the capital letter S and to sort the results it returns to us by the value in the field called mname. It may not surprise you to learn that mname is the model's name, modelno is our reference number for her, mbigimage is the (location of the) large size headshot of her and mimage is the (location of the) smaller size headshot of her.

You may have noticed that the only part of this that wasn't copied verbatim from the code is the from models bit and that there we've used the WACS API call conf_get_attr to get the actual name of the database table concerned from the main WACS configuration file. This is actually important and it's strongly recommended that you do use this form when creating SQL queries. If you really insist on knowing why, take a look at the section on the tables part of the wacs.cfg configuration file in the WACS configuration guide.

Once we've created the SQL query, we feed it to the database routines. The first step is to pass in the SQL query and have the database perform that search on the database. Once the query has been executed, we want to pull back the matching records (or rows in database parlence) for each model. In both Php and Perl we're calling a routine that returns to us a single row from the database (a single model's record in this case) each time it's called. When we run out of records, a null return is given and our while loop ends. In Php, the function to do this is called using fetch which returns the next row in the way we request. Here we ask for it to be returned to us as an array of values by specifying PDO::FETCH_NUM . We assign this array of values into the variable $results each time. In Perl, the function we're using is called fetchrow_array because perl gives us the choice of how we want the data returned to us in the name of the function. There are other function names in perl that provide other layouts of the data - a PDO::FETCH_ASSOC argument to fetch in php is much the same as using fetchrow_hashref in perl.

	Note
	There are other approaches to getting back the data, including having it returned in one big lump - this has been avoided as some WACS installations have tens of thousands of matching records for some queries. It is good practice and perfectly OK to handle one record at a time and the database routines can cope well with this.

The final step is to actually generate some output from the data we've fetched from the database. We're going to do this as an unordered list in HTML, so we're going to be adding a little formating to the output as we retrieve each record.

print "<ul>\n";
while( $results = $cursor->fetch(PDO::FETCH_NUM) )
{
        print "<li>";
        print "<a href=\"".$wacs->conf_get_attr("server","cgiurl");
        print "wacsmpthumbs/".$results[1]."\">";
        print $results[0]."</a></li>\n";
}
print "</ul>\n";

and here's the perl version...

print "<ul>\n";
while( @results = $cursor->fetchrow_array )
{
        print "<li>";
        print "<a href=\"".conf_get_attr("server","cgiurl");
        print "wacsmpthumbs/".$results[1]."\">";
        print $results[0]."</a></li>\n";
}
print "<ul>\n";

We start off by printing out the HTML instruction to start an unordered list (<ul>) in a line on it's own. We then start a while loop which goes through each entry until it's done them all. Both versions use the database cursor object ($cursor) to fetch the next record (aka row) from the database using the fetch(PDO::FETCH_NUM) or fetchrow_array method and assigning it into the array $results (or in perl @results). The act of the assignment fails when there are no more records to fetch and the while loop will terminate. The construct here is based upon the fact that both languages have seperate operators for assignment (=) and comparison (== and eq) and so the code is unambiguous (at least to the php and perl interpreters it is!).

Once inside the body of the while loop we print out the start of list entry tag (<li>) and start in on making use of the data. In the quest to make this example a little bit more satisfying, we've tried to make sure this application does something vaguely useful. A simple list of names is all well and good, but we wanted it to actually do something! So what we've done here is to create a link around each models name that points to her model page as displayed by the standard WACS tools. The raw HTML to achieve this would look like:

<a href="http://www.mywacsserver.com/cgi-bin/wacsmpthumbs/123">
Sarah</a>

So we're left with a slight problem here in that we don't know in advance (trust me on this) what the WACS server is called, we don't know what the models are called and we don't know what their numbers are. We have no idea if we have a model number 123 or not and whether she's called Sarah; but the WACS system should be able to fill in all the blanks for us.

The first part of the code merely prints out the start of the HTML <a href="> and then we ask the WACS configuration system what it's externally visible URL for cgi-bin programs is. We do this using the conf_get_attr call again, telling it we want an answer in the section server of the URL for cgi scripts aka cgiurl. On the next line of the example we put the name of the WACS application we want to link to, in this case wacsmpthumbs. Since the way we tell wacsmpthumbs what we want it to look up is to add a slash and then the model number to the URL, we add a slash (/) on the end and then the number.

	Tip
	You may have noticed that we added a comment on the line above the SQL select statement with 0,1,2,3 with each number above the field name in the query. This was a shorthand to ourselves to remind us what the index number in the array is for each of those database fields.

Since the order of the fields we asked for was mname, modelno, mbigimage and then mimage, the results in the array will be the same - element 0 will be the mname, element 1 will be the model number, and so on. In both cases we're dealing with a single-dimensional array. The first field we want to go into the URL for wacsmodelthumbs is the model number, so that will be element 1 (not zero) therefore we write $results[1]. We then finish off the URL reference by closing the quotes (") and the > tag.

We then want to print the model's name which will be element 0 in our arrays, put out the closing anchor tag (</a>) and then finish off the unordered line entry with the end line tag (</li>). We then print out a new line so the generated page is easier to read. The moving on to the next record will be done as a by-product of the test for the next iteration around the while loop. Once we exit the loop, we finish off the HTML unordered list.

To just finally finish it off, we need to add a few more pieces just to make it work. For the Php version, we need to declare it as being a php program with <?php at the very start of the file, with a matching ?> at the very end. For perl, we need to declare it as a perl script with the very first line being just #!/usr/bin/perl. Additionally for perl, we need to output the mime content type declaration so that the web browser knows what kind of object it's being passed - this is done simply with:

print "Content-Type: text/html\n";
print "\n";

Next we need a couple of lines of HTML preamble near the beginning (as mentioned before, just before the database connection code so we could see any error message that appears):

<html>
<head>
<title>MySimple: Index Of Favourites</title>
</head>
<body>

Similarly at the end, we just need to finish the page off with the html tail piece:

</body>
</html>

Our first WACS application is now complete, so copy the file into the either the web server document tree (for Php) or the web server cgi-bin directory (for perl). When you call up the URL, you should see something like this....

Granted it's fairly plain, but the names are in alphabetical order and there are links on each name to that girl's model page. If you didn't see any output, or got an error, you need to check the error log for the server you're using. With Apache on linux, the usual location of this is /var/log/httpd/www.mywacserver.com-errorlog or something similar to that.

This has been a fairly long and intense chapter, but we obviously had a lot of ground to cover and we really wanted to achieve a usable program before the end of it. This hopefully we've done. We've seen how to include the WACS module and the Database interface module. We've seen how to use read_conf and check_auth to read the configuration files and check the user's credentials. We've then made multiple uses of conf_get_attr to get all of the information together we need to make a connection to the database.

After all that setup procedure, which will become a very familiar template as you program with the WACS API, we looked at creating and sending a query to the database, retrieving the results and formating those results as a simple web page. In the next chapter, we'll look at how to make use of other information stored within the database.

The next step is to modify the display loop to include the extra details and in this case it probably makes sense to switch to using an HTML table cell to contain and manage the entry. We'll start off by simply re-writing the existing display loop to build the results into an HTML table instead - once we have that working, we'll restyle the table to include the extra fields we just added to the query. There is no actual requirement to make use of all the fields we've requested.

Lets have a look at the structure of the HTML document we're outputing here: First we need to open the new table, then each model will have her own row as we go through with the headshot image on the left and her name on the right, and finally we'll finish off the table. The HTML (minus the links) to do this will look something like:

<table>
 <tr>
  <td><img src="modicons/KazB-1.jpg" alt="[Kaz B]"></td>
  <th>Kaz B</th>
 </tr>
 <tr>
  <td><img src="modicons/Roxanne-1.jpg" alt="[Roxanne]"></td>
  <th>Roxanne</th>
 </tr>
 <tr>
  <td><img src="modicons/Sabrina-1.jpg" alt="[Sabrina]"></td>
  <th>Sabrina</th>
 </tr>
</table>

Of course the next step is to re-write the code to actually recreate the necessary HTML; the start and end of the table simply replace the unordered list (<ul> and </ul> ) tags outside the loop that iterates through the list of models returned by the database. The list element (<li> and </li>) tags get replaced by the row start and end tags (<tr> and </tr>. Since we're puting the headshot icon and the name in separate elements and want a link to the appropriate model page on both of them, we need to double up the code that creates the hypertext link to wacsmpthumbs. We then include the icon (with alignment attributes) in a standard table tag ( <td> and the name in a heading (<th>) table tag so it comes out in bold and is centred.

The mysimple example thus re-writen will look like:

// output the results
print "<table>\n";
while( $results = $cursor->fetch(PDO::FETCH_NUM) )
{
        // start the HTML table row
        print "<tr><td valign=top align=center>\n";
        // link around the headshot image
        print "<a href=\"".$wacs->conf_get_attr("server","cgiurl");
        print "wacsmpthumbs/".$results[1]."\">";
        // head shot image
        print "<img src=\"".$wacs->conf_get_attr("server","siteurl");
        print "modicons/".$results[3]."\"[".$results[0]."]\"></a>\n";
        // end this cell and start the next
        print "</td><th>\n";
        // link around name
        print "<a href=\"".$wacs->conf_get_attr("server","cgiurl");
        print "wacsmpthumbs/".$results[1]."\">";
        // the name
        print $results[0]."</a>\n";
        // end the HTML table row
        print "</th></tr>\n";
}
print "</table>\n";
// finish off

# output the results
print "<table>\n";
while( @results = $cursor->fetchrow_array )
{
        # start the HTML table row
        print "<tr><td valign=top align=center>\n";
        # link around the headshot image
        print "<a href=\"".conf_get_attr("server","cgiurl");
        print "wacsmpthumbs/".$results[1]."\">";
        # head shot image
        print "<img src=\"".conf_get_attr("server","siteurl");
        print "modicons/".$results[3]."\"[".$results[0]."]\"></a>\n";
        # end this cell and start the next
        print "</td><th>\n";
        # link around name
        print "<a href=\"".conf_get_attr("server","cgiurl");
        print "wacsmpthumbs/".$results[1]."\">";
        # the name
        print $results[0]."</a>\n";
        # end the HTML table row
        print "</th></tr>\n";
}
print "</table>\n";
# finish off

When run, this modified version of the script should produce the following:

As you can see, this has improved the layout somewhat over the previous version using just unordered list elements. These days we would probably actually use an extensive structure of div elements to identify the various parts and then style and lay them out using the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) file. Although old, the tables mechanism is a much simpler way to start out with laying out data. Now to add those extra fields....

To display some more details about the model, we're going to span the headshot on the left hand side over several rows, and add the model details themselves as additional table rows on the right hand side. Our first change therefore is to add rowspan=4 to the options on the image container <td> tag. The resulting php code is:

        // start the HTML table row
        print "<tr><td rowspan=4 valign=top align=center>\n";
        // link around the headshot image

and in perl reads:

        # start the HTML table row
        print "<tr><td rowspan=4 valign=top align=center>\n";
        # link around the headshot image

Next we add the second row which will include her hair colour and length, then a third row which will describe her breast size and the fourth row that gives the number of image sets and the number of videos we have for her.

        // end the HTML table row
        print "</th></tr>\n";
        // do the second row (her hair)
        print "<tr><td>hair: ";
        print $results[5]." ".$results[4];
        print "</td></tr>\n";
        // do the third row (her breasts)
        print "<tr><td>breasts: ";
        print $results[6]."\n";
        print "</td></tr>\n";
        // do the fourth row (her sets)
        print "<tr><td>sets: ";
        print $results[7];
        if( $results[8] > 0 )
        {
                print " videos: ".$results[8];
        }
        print "</td></tr>\n";

and the same implemented in perl would look like:

        # end the HTML table row
        print "</th></tr>\n";
        # do the second row (her hair)
        print "<tr><td>hair: ";
        print $results[5]." ".$results[4];
        print "</td></tr>\n";
        # do the third row (her breasts)
        print "<tr><td>breasts: ";
        print $results[6]."\n";
        print "</td></tr>\n";
        # do the fourth row (her sets)
        print "<tr><td>sets: ";
        print $results[7];
        if( $results[8] > 0 )
        {
                print " videos: ".$results[8];
        }
        print "</td></tr>\n";
}

With these changes made, if you now run this version of the program, which is called mysimple4 in the samples/programming directory, you should see something like this:

There's obviously a lot more room for using many more of the fields within the model schema for further improvement of our model index, and we'll return to this subject in a later chapter (Chapter 6, The User Interface Toolkit). Before we leave the topic of models and move on to sets, we will cover just one more topic, that of adding rating icons.

Since we're starting a new application, we'll start from scratch with the basic bones which we'll call setdisp. Much of the basic structure of this program should be getting quite familiar by now. The same five basic steps are to be found here - bring in the modules, initialise them, set up the database connection, submit the query and loop through the results outputting them.

What we're setting out to do in this script is to display a list of the latest additions of image sets marked as being of category flag type T which means they're solo sets involving toy usage. This we achieve by requesting only sets of type I which means image sets and of category flag type T.

	Tip
	The full lists of recommended values for the type and category flag can be found in the schema reference section at the back of this book in Chapter 13, Schema Reference: Sets.

The basic format is that we once again create an HTML table with a row for each record. There's a link on the name of the set that leads to the standard WACS page display program wacsindex. This takes a number of URL arguments but the one we're using here is to prefix the set number with page which puts it into paged display mode and appended with a .html so that it saves correctly and in some cases will get cached. We're shrinking the font in which it's displayed as it can be quite a long line of text in it's stored form (but more on that topic later).

	Tip
	wacsindex's URL is given by the apps section of the configuration attributes under the name wacsindex.

	Note
	The SQL query itself looks after the ordering of the output; the order by sadded desc retrieves the entries in the reverse order in which they were added - the database field sadded being the date the set was added to the database, and the desc (meaning descending) puts the biggest value first. In this case that is the most recent date...

<?php
// setdisp - set display program
require_once "wacs.php";
$wacs = new Wacs;
$wacs->read_conf();
$wacs->check_auth( $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'],1 );
// start the document
print "<html>\n";
print "<head>\n";
print "<title>SetDisp - List of Sets</title>\n";
print "</head>\n";
print "<body>\n";
// connect to the database
$dbienv = $wacs->conf_get_attr("database","dbienvvar");
if( ! empty( $dbienv ) )
{
        putenv($dbienv."=".$wacs->conf_get_attr("database","dbienvvalue"));
}
try {
        $dbhandle = new PDO( 
                $wacs->conf_get_attr("database","phppdoconnect"),
                $wacs->conf_get_attr("database","dbuser"),
                $wacs->conf_get_attr("database","dbpass") );
}
catch( PDOException $e )
{
        die("Can't connect to database\nReason:".$e->getMessage()."\n");
}
// do the query
//                0      1       2      3         4        5
$query = "select setno, stitle, stype, scatflag, simages, scodec ".
         "from ".$wacs->conf_get_attr("tables","sets")." ".
         "where stype = 'I' and scatflag = 'T' ".
         "order by sadded desc ";
$cursor = $dbhandle->prepare( $query );
$cursor->execute();
// output the results
print "<table>\n";
$setcount=0;
while( (($results = $cursor->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ROW)) &&
        ($setcount < 25 )) )
{
        // start the row
        print "<tr><td align=center>\n";
        // create the link
        print "<a href=\"".$wacs->conf_get_attr("apps","wacsindex");
        print "/page".$results[0].".html\">";
        // print out the set name
        print "<font size=-2 face=\"arial,helv,helvetica,sans\">";
        print $results[1]."</font></a>\n";
        // end the row
        print "</td></tr>\n";
        $setcount++;
}
print "</table>\n";
print "</body>\n";
print "</html>\n";
?>

and implementing the same code in perl gives us:

#!/usr/bin/perl 
# setdisp - set display program
use Wacs; 
use DBI;
read_conf();
check_auth( $ENV{'REMOTE_ADDR'},1 );
# output the HTML headers
print "Content-Type: text/html\n";
print "\n";
print "<html>\n";
print "<head>\n";
print "<title>SetDisp - List of Sets</title>\n";
print "</head>\n";
print "<body>\n";
# connect to the database
$dbienv = conf_get_attr("database","dbienvvar");
if( $dbienv ne "" )
{
        $ENV{$dbienv}= conf_get_attr( "database","dbienvvalue" );
}
$dbhandle=DBI->connect( conf_get_attr("database","dbiconnect"),
                        conf_get_attr("database","dbuser"),
                        conf_get_attr("database","dbpass") ) ||
die("Can't connect to database\nReason given was $DBI::errstr\n");
#                 0      1       2      3         4        5
$query = "select setno, stitle, stype, scatflag, simages, scodec ".
         "from ".conf_get_attr("tables","sets")." ".
         "where stype = 'I' and scatflag = 'T' ".
         "order by sadded desc ";
$cursor = $dbhandle->prepare( $query );
$cursor->execute;
# output the results
print "<table>\n";
$setcount=0;
while( (($results = $cursor->fetchrow_array ) &&
        ($setcount < 25 )) )
{
        # start the row
        print "<tr><td align=center>\n";
        # create the link
        print "<a href=\"".conf_get_attr("apps","wacsindex");
        print "/page".$results[0].".html\">";
        # print out the set name
        print "<font size=-2 face=\"arial,helv,helvetica,sans\">";
        print $results[1]."</font></a>\n";
        # end the row
        print "</td></tr>\n";
        $setcount++;
}
print "</table>\n";
print "</body>\n";
print "</html>\n";

When we run this set against our demonstration web server, we get the following output which is a list of the sets containing dildo use in most-recent first order.

While it works and is usable, it's not exactly the greatest web page ever, so let's try and brighten it up a little. It'd be quite nice to be able to include an icon, and of course wacs has the infrastructure to do this for us. In fact, it offers us three different options of what size of icons we'd like: set, std and mini. In this case since we're trying to get a fair number of entries shown, we'll opt for the mini version. We get this by calling the wacsimg command and specifying that we'd like the mini version.

To make this happen we need to add another cell to the table with the HTML img tag pointing at wacsimg. As before we'll specify both align and valign properties for this table cell. So if we modify the code, much as we did before for the model icons, we get the following in php:

        // start the row
        print "<tr><td valign=top align=center>\n";
        // create the link for the icon
        print "<a href=\"".$wacs->conf_get_attr("apps","wacsindex");
        print "/page".$results[0].".html\">";
        // add the icon itself
        print "<img src=\"".$wacs->conf_get_attr("apps","wacsimg");
        print "/mini".$results[0].".jpg\" alt=\"[icon for ";
        print $results[0]."]\">";
        // end cell, next cell
        print "</td><td align=center>\n";
        // create the link

and of course the same example in perl looks like:

        # start the row
        print "<tr><td valign=top align=center>\n";
        # create the link for the icon
        print "<a href=\"".conf_get_attr("apps","wacsindex");
        print "/page".$results[0].".html\">";
        # add the icon itself
        print "<img src=\"".conf_get_attr("apps","wacsimg");
        print "/mini".$results[0].".jpg\" alt=\"[icon for ";
        print $results[0]."]\">";
        # end cell, next cell
        print "</td><td align=center>\n";
        # create the link

and if we run the resulting program, we get something like this:

One of the design decisions taken when designing WACS was to encourage directory names to be the same as the set names, and to make those more usable outside of the WACS system, to make them not include spaces. Instead the so-called Camel Technique, so named because of all the humps in it, where an upper case letter signifies the start of each new word. This is used along with a technique where underscores (_) act as the transitions between the three sections of the set name: these are:

However the underscore aspect is only used in the directory name and not in the set title (field stitle) as stored in the database which has spaces instead. Amongst our tasks, we will need to replace the spaces with the appropriate HTML table tags.

	Note
	A future direction for Wacs is to move away from this approach and have separate fields for these three things and a fourth which describes the action taking place in the set. The Camel Style text will remain an option in the current fields for a long time to come.

Fortunately we can use a regular expression to convert the Camel-Style text back into something a little bit more readable. This next group of changes to the code are to do exactly that. We're going to take a slightly different approach from before as we're not going to make the split off parts into seperate HTML table cells. This is because that makes both the font setting and HTML link creation much more complex - we're merely going to insert a forced line break <br> tag into the places where we want a new line to start. Then we're going to break up the Camel-Style text into seperate words. We do this with:

Our first substitution is going to be to replace the spaces (the section dividers in the stitle field) with the appropriate HTML directives. The second and third ones actually break up the words at the points the case changes:

        // print out the set name
        print "<font size=-2 face=\"arial,helv,helvetica,sans\">";
        $prettytext = $results[1];
        $prettytext = preg_replace('/\s/','<br>', $prettytext );
        $prettytext = preg_replace('/(\w)([A-Z][a-z])/','$1 $2', $prettytext );
        $prettytext = preg_replace('/([a-z])([A-Z])','$1 $2', $prettytext );
        print $prettytext."</font></a>\n";
        // end the row

To implement the same functionality in perl actually uses exactly the same regular expressions (aka regexp) but looks very different as it's all done in assignment operations without any explicit function call. There's no preg_replace used here. Anyway here is exactly the same functionality in perl:

        # print out the set name
        print "<font size=-2 face=\"arial,helv,helvetica,sans\">";
        $prettytext = $results[1];
        $prettytext =~ s/\s/<br>/g;
        $prettytext =~ s,(\w)([A-Z][a-z]),$1 $2,g;
        $prettytext =~ s,([a-z])([A-Z]),$1 $2,g;
        print $prettytext."</font></a>\n";
        # end the row

With these changes in place, we can once again copy over the code and we have a much more presentable output from the program; here's an example:

Hopefully with this we've got the output presentation of the sets list looking a whole lot better than it was in the first example. There are of course many more fields within the set database that we could also make use of in our pages. We will return to them when we look at the WACS User Interface Toolkit in Chapter 6, The User Interface Toolkit. For now, before we finish our look at sets, we're just going to look at how we find the model or models featured in a given set.

One of the things that often confuses people about true relational databases is that they are unable to do a one-to-many or many-to-many relationship directly. While many so called easy-to-use databases do offer field types that purport to offer such linking, they are problematic and do not fit into any sensible logical model for how things should be structured. Worse, each vendor's implementation (those who do implement it at all) is different and incompatible. However with a sensible schema design, this limitation really isn't a problem at all.

One such instance of this need to link one-to-many is the concept of linking a set with a model within WACS. In the easy case, you'd have thought that you'd simply put the model number into one of the fields in the set schema and the job would be done. But what do you then do when you have two models featuring in a set; easy you might say - one is the main model, the other is a secondary model, so just add a second field for the additional model and put the second number there. Of course that then makes the SQL query more complex each time as you've got to check both fields before you know if a model is in a set or not. It still might work, but it's already getting cumbersome. You might discover a set first by virtue of the additional model and only afterwards identify the official primary model.

Just about every adult site we've encountered does feature at least a few sets with three models, so suddenly we're looking at a second additional model field and having to check that as well. And believe me, there are a few sites of which Sapphic Erotica comes to mind in particular where sets with three, four, five or even six models in a single set are relatively common. Simply put, adding models to the sets table just doesn't scale. So we take the proper relational database approach and add an additional schema called assoc for associations which gives us these relationships. It's a very simple schema, basically containing a primary key, a model number and a set number.

The process of finding out who is in a set becomes very simple and straight forward - you simply search the assoc table for the set number you're looking at. If we're looking for who is in set no 123, we simply use the following SQL query:

select amodelno from assoc
where asetno = 123

We then merely loop through the results of the above query and each record we find is another model involved in this set. If we don't get any results returned, then there aren't any models associated with this particular set. Of course we probably want more than just the model number(s), but that too is relatively simple. Consider the following query:

select modelno, mname, mimage, mbigimage
from models, assoc
where modelno = amodelno
  and asetno = 123

This query simply retrieves the model details for each model who is involved with this particular set, one record at a time. Due to the way relational databases are engineered, this is actually a very quick and efficent process. The first line of the where clause does what is known as a relational join and establishes the necessary connection between the assoc and models tables necessary for what we're trying to do. Additionally it's a very logical and elegant solution that will cope with none, one, two, three, four or as many models as you like within a single simple action.

	Note
	Although we make use of the assoc table, we don't actually use any results from it - we don't need to - it has silently taken care of handling the connection we needed to make.

If we go back to our example program displaying sets, we can modify it to include this activity as a sub-routine. What we're going to do is to divide the right hand side of the output into the two cells, one with the title, and the other with the model(s) featuring in the set. The icon will remain on the left. First step is to add the rowspan attribute to the left hand side cell so the icon spans it.

        // start the row
        print "<tr><td rowspan=2 valign=top align=center>\n";
        // create the link for the icon

and in perl, it'll look very similar:

        # start the row
        print "<tr><td rowspan=2 valign=top align=center>\n";
        # create the link for the icon

The next step is to create a new function to handle the query to look up the entries in the assoc table. We're going to call this function simply getmodel and it'll take just one argument, the set number for which we want the model(s) details. It will return to us a potentially quite long string variable containing all the model names that matched surrounded by a link to each model's WACS model page.

	Note
	So long as we use a different cursor variable to the database routines we can quite happily run another query and loop through it's results while inside an outer loop looking at the results of a completely different query. This is where the whole concept of a cursor becomes really useful.

function getmodel ( $setno ) {
        global $dbhandle;
        global $wacs;
        $gmresult='';
        //                   0        1      2       3
        $modelquery="select modelno, mname, mimage, mbigimage ".
                    "from ".$wacs->conf_get_attr("tables","models").
                    ", ".$wacs->conf_get_attr("tables","assoc")." ".
                    "where modelno = amodelno ".
                    "  and asetno = ".$setno." ".
                    "order by mname ";
        $modelcursor=$dbhandle->prepare( $modelquery );
        $modelcursor->execute();
        // loop through the results
        while( $modelresults = $modelcursor->fetch(PDO::FETCH_NUM) )
        {
                // do we need a divider?
                if( ! empty( $gmresult ))
                {
                        $gmresult.="<br>";
                }
                // add the model link
                $gmresult.="<a href=\"".$wacs->conf_get_attr(
                                "apps","wacsmthu")."/".
                                $modelresults[0]."\">";
                // add her name and close link
                $gmresult.=$modelresults[1]."</a>";
        }
        // return the complete string
        return( $gmresult );
}

and the same code implemented in perl looks like this:

sub getmodel( $ )
{
        my( $setno )=@_;
        my( $gmresult, $modelquery, $modelcursor, @modelresults );
        $gmresult='';
        #
        $modelquery="select modelno, mname, mimage, mbigimage ".
                    "from ".conf_get_attr("tables","models").
                    ", ".conf_get_attr("tables","assoc")." ".
                    "where modelno = amodelno ".
                    "  and asetno = ".$setno." ".
                    "order by mname ";
        $modelcursor=$dbhandle->prepare( $modelquery );
        $modelcursor->execute;
        # loop through the results
        while( @modelresults = $modelcursor->fetchrow_array )
        {
                # do we need a divider
                if( $gmresult ne "" )
                {
                        $gmresult.="<br>";
                }
                # add the model link
                $gmresult.="<a href=\"".conf_get_attr("apps","wacsmthu").
                        "/".$modelresults[0]."\">";
                # add her name and close link
                $gmresult.=$modelresults[1]."</a>";
        }
        # return the complete string
        return( $gmresult );
}

The final step of this process is to add into our main loop going through the retrieved set records a call to the getmodel function. This looks like:

        // next right hand cell
        print "<tr><td align=center><font size=-1>\n";
        print getmodel( $results[0] );
        print "</font></td></tr>\n";
        // increment set count 

and in perl this looks like

        # next right hand cell
        print "<tr><td align=center><font size=-1>\n";
        print getmodel( $results[0] );
        print "</font></td></tr>\n";
        # increment set count 

With these changes incorporated into the code, we now have the finished version of the setdisp program (setdisp4.php or setdisp4 in the samples directory. If we now copy this script up to the web server and run it, we should see something like this:

Once again we've gradually developed a program up to the point where it is now offering quite reasonable functionality and layout making use of the WACS programmers toolkit API. Hopefully this has given you an insight into what WACS is capable of and the basics of how to make use of it's API. In due course, we hope to have a respository of WACS skins, or mini-site scripts, which you can download and tailor to your own needs. If in the course of learning the WACS API you write some programs you'd be happy to share with others, please send them to us and we'll include them in the respository.

This mechanism is implemented through the srank database field. This currently is defined to four possible values or no value - normal sets that should appear are described as primary sets and they will have an srank of P indicating it is a primary record. Where a record has no srank value, it should be assumed to be a Primary record for backwards compatibility with earlier WACS records.

In the case where a record is an alternative version of a set that already exists, it should be given the srank of S indicating it is a secondary record. In addition to this, the sduplicates field for this record should contain the set number of it's primary version and the sduplicates field of the primary version should point to this secondary set. Where there are three or more variants of the same thing, this should be a circular chain taking you to the next such set and at the final duplicate, back to the primary set. The set administration tools do not currently support setting up a three or more way chain of links, but the code shouldn't be broken by that existing within the database.

The third and final of the four cases are those of Tertiary records and of a continuation record. Tertiary records are given an srank of T and are ignored by almost all search and display functions. Where possible, Tertiary should have the same sduplicates links as seconday sets do. This allows applications which manipulate searches and the like to try and present a current version of the set concerned. Continuation records will be given the srank of C indicating a continuation record. This srank will only be set on the second and subsequent set records of this conceptual chain - the first set in a chain with continuations will be either a Primary or Secondary set. In addition to the set being of the Continuation type, it will have a number of other fields set to help in navigation. The first of these is that the second such set, eg the first continuation, will have the sprevious field set to the set number of the first set in the sequence. If there is a second continuation set (ie third part of the whole set), the sprevious will be set to the number of the first set, and the snext will be set to the number of the third (second continuation) set.

Since this is a fairly complex concept, here's a diagram to try and help you understand what is going on here:

In the diagram we're dealing with four separate sets that effectively contain exactly the same scenario with the same model in the same location. The first of these in the diagram is set 123 which is a straightforward image set - nothing special about it except that it does have a corresponding video clip. It uses only one of the relationship links to link to the best quality (and therefore choosen to be the Primary ) version of the video clip which is set 124. This is the saltmedia link as Video is an alternative media to a still image set.

Moving on to the video clips, note that all three of them say that their alternative media is the single, only version of the image set. Therefore the saltmedia on each of the videos mentions the image set, namely set 123 as their direct alternative. This is fine - it doesn't have to be a symetric relationship, just true! These links are shown by the red line on the diagram.

We have three video clips and this is obviously the most complex part of the diagram and the relationships we're trying to explain. For the sake of argument we're going to say that the first video clip, set 124 is a High Definition MPEG-4 movie file weighing in at a massive 1920 x 1280 pixels and 700MBytes. It's HUGE. The other two video clips are Standard Definition WMV movie files containing the same movie at DVD resolution of 720 x 480 pixels and weighing in at 90MBytes and 82MBytes respectively. These sizes are far more appropriate for people using media players on their mobile phones, tablet computers or just simply older PCs without the power to play High Definition video properly. The movie has been broken into two approximately equal size video clips to make downloading them easier when on the move or with a limited bandwidth connection.

Starting off with the big High Definition movie clip, we can see that this is the Primary version of this set and therefore the one we want to appear in searches, new release highlights and on the simpler model pages. The other versions are no different in what they contain in terms of subject matter and the choice between them can be made once the set itself has been selected. We also don't want all three versions appearing multiply in any selection the user makes.

The first of the Standard Definition video clips contains the start of our movie and so that's always going to be the one that anything else refers to when looking for the smaller version. It's therefore classed as the Secondary version and it has links back to the primary version by way of the sduplicates link because it contains the very same footage as the Primary version does, just in a reduced size format. These are the green links on the diagram.

Note

Note that the second part of the video, namely set 126 also links back to set 124 as it's primary as the longer complete High Definition clip contains the same scenes as the second half of the Standard Definition clip does. Of course if the High Definition clip was also split into two parts, the second half of the Standard Definition clip would link via sduplicates to the second half of the High Definition clip.

The final group of links on the diagram, those in blue, concern linking together the two sequential halves of the Standard Definition clip. Therefore set 125's snext field says "my movie continues in set 126" and set 126 uses sprevious to point back to set 125 a preceeding it. In addition the ssetpos field is set to 1, 2, 3, etc to indicate a given clip's place within the overall movie.

	Note
	It's important to note that the sprevious and snext link chains are NOT circular. The sprevious of the first (Primary or Secondary) set will be null, as will the snext of the final set in the chain.

While it's not really what we're discussing here, there are various utility functions in the WacsStd perl module to aid and abet in maintaining these links if you are writing your own collection maintenance tools. Take a look at linkfromprevious and linkrelated for more information on these.

Hopefully after the last few sections, you now understand why the Link Relations mechanism was added and how it should work. Obviously we now need to feed this back into how we write SQL code to retrieve sets. There are two main things we're going to want to do - the first is to tailor our main retrieval pages to ignore these various alternative versions, and the second is on some occasions to detect where there might be additional icons and links we need to add to our set display code.

The code to ignore Secondary and Continuation records from our normal set index selections. This can be done with this SQL code segment:

( srank not in ('C','S','T') or srank is null )

As an example, if you want to select Lesbian sets in a Countryside location, you'd create a query something like:

select setno, stitle, stype, srating from sets
where slocation = 'Country' and scatflag = 'L'
  and ( srank not in ('C','S','T') or srank is null );

Note

At this point we've been using the srank variable for a while and have just added the fourth Tertiary to the previous three values of Primary, Secondary and Continuation. As we just found cause to add an additional value and may at some time in the future add even more, you may wish to define a variable at the top of your files - $rankfilt to set which ones you're trying to filter. At present this would be $rankfilt="'C','S','T'" and would be used within the brackets of the in () clause in the SQL.

Of course, it's not quite as simple as this because we don't actually know what a given users preference exclusions are at the time of writing the code. We've therefore got to retrieve that information from their authentication record, be it a lease or a permanent address-based authentication. In earlier chapters we encountered the conf_get_attr function that can be used to get answers from the configuration file. There is an almost identical mechanism for getting access to the authentication file called auth_get_attr.

To make use of the auth_get_attr function, we need to provide it with a key with which to look up the authentication record we want. At present we're keying this on the IP version 4 address of the client computer to which we're talking although additional methods are due to be added in time. When running under the Apache 2 web server, we are provided with the address of the client computer via an environment variable called REMOTE_ADDR. We pass this to the auth_get_attr function with the prefix "ipv4-" to indicate the type of address we're passing. The object we need to request from the authentication record is called prefexcl.

Assuming that our client machine is has the IP Version 4 address of 192.168.1.136 we'd therefore effectively pass the request to auth_get_conf as:

$exclusions = auth_get_conf( "ipv4-192.168.1.136", "prefexcl" );

Of course in fact we're not going to hard code the IP address into our Perl or PHP script, so the actual code we write will look more like this in perl:

$exclusions = auth_get_conf( "ipv4-".$ENV{"REMOTE_ADDR"}, "prefexcl" );

and in PHP it'll look like this:

$exclusions = $wacs->auth_get_attr( "ipv4-".$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'],
		"prefexcl");

Once we've excuted this function call, the variable exclusions will contain something like "L,B" - the more observant amongst you will realise that while being what we need to know, it's not yet phrased in a way that SQL will accept as a list to be passed to an in() clause. We need to quote each of the values independantly and separate them by commas.

Now that we have the preference exclusions list for our current user, we need to translate this into a form that SQL will accept as a query condition. The following code segment in perl does this for you:

$exclusions =~ s/\s//g;   # remove excess spaces
$exclusions =~ s/,/','/g; # quote them
$sqlquery .= "and (scatflag not in ('".$exclusions."') or ".
	          "scatflag is null) ";

You will see that we're here appending to a variable called sqlquery which is assumed to already contain the necessary select, from and where clauses for the search we wish to carry out. The same basic code implemented in PHP will look like:

$exclusions = preg_replace( '/\s/','', $exclusions );
$exclusions = preg_replace( '/,/',"','", $exclusions );
$sqlquery .= "and (scatflag not in ('".$exclusions."') or ".
	          "scatflag is null) ";

	Note
	One optimisation you can, probably should make, is to do this at the start of your program if you're going to write multiple database queries and place it in a global variable. The answer to the authentication file query is going to be unchanged for the time that this program will be drawing it's web page or whatever it does.

There are of course occasions when you don't want to make use of the preference exclusions mechanism, in particular when you're handling saved searches where you assume that if the set is included within the results returned that that is what the user desires. It's also generally a good idea to indicate somewhere on the page you generate that preference exclusions have been applied when displaying this particular group of sets. While the user can change their preference exclusions at any time, it's unlikely to be that prominent that all of them will realise how to do so immediately.

To include support for the WACS User Interface (WacsUI) toolkit within your application, you need to add the following extra lines to your code, ideally just after the Wacs core module.

require_once "wacsui.php";

$wacsui = new WacsUI;

and here's the perl dialect of the same activity...

use Wacs::WacsUI;

	Note
	NB: From Wacs 0.8.6, the WacsUI module now lives in a Wacs sub-directory and so needs to be called as Wacs::WacsUI instead of just WacsUI.

The first function from WacsUI that we're going to look at is called describeher and it is designed to take the output of the very regemented values of the model attributes fields of the database and turn them into something much more readable. Although not implemented yet this provides a good mechanism for doing other translations or providing an attribute table rather than a textual description.

print $wacsui->describeher( 
       array( 'hair'=>$results[4],
         'length'=>results[5],
         'titsize'=>results[6],
         'pussy'=>results[7],
         'race'=>results[8],
         'build'=>results[9],
         'height'=>results[10],
         'weight'=>results[11],
         'occupation'=>results[12]))."\n";

	Note
	We have to package up our parameter list as an array in order to pass it in Php; perl is somewhat simpler with a simple sequence of named parameters.

print describeher(
        hair=>$results[4],
        length=>$results[5],
        titsize=>$results[6],
        pussy=>$results[7],
        race=>$results[8],
        build=>$results[9],
        height=>$results[10],
        weight=>$results[11],
        occupation=>$results[12] )."\n";

The above example is based upon modifying the MySimple example program from in the second chapter (Chapter 2, Basics: Getting Started) to add the following extra fields into the query: mhair, mlength, mtitsize, mpussy, mrace, mbuild, mheight, mweight, moccupation after the mimage (with a comma of course) and before the from clause.

As with the previous describeher, whatshedoes is designed to make a readable sentence from a number of fixed format database fields. In this case however, it's a little different as the values passed in are typically either Y for yes, or N for no, and they are translated to a text phrase based upon what they're value is. This also means that if you're using array subscripts to fetch the database field values you need to be careful about positioning. Give a yes to the wrong field and the error will not be as obvious - while “blonde breasts” would be easy to spot, the fact that each model who did masturbation scenes was listed as doing straight scenes would be less apparent.

For the purposes of this example, we're adding yet more fields to the select statement in the original MySimple program shown in the second chapter (Chapter 2, Basics: Getting Started). In this case msolo, mstraight, mlesbian, mfetish, mtoys, mmast and mother.

print $wacsui->whatshedoes(
	array( 'solo'=>$results[13],
	       'straight'=>$results[14],
	       'lesbian'=>$results[15],
	       'fetish'=>$results[16],
	       'toys'=>$results[17],
	       'masturbation'=>$results[18],
	       'other'=>$results[19] ) )."\n";

The same function works just the same in perl without the need for the array declaration wrapper:

print whatshedoes(
	solo=>$results[13],
	straight=>$results[14],
	lesbian=>$results[15],
	fetish=>$results[16],
	toys=>$results[17],
	masturbation=>$results[18],
	other=>$results[19])."\n";

Both the models and sets schemas feature fields that contain a space seperated list of keywords that mark certain attributes found within that set. These can be quickly turned into a small HTML table of icons using the routine addkeyicons. The fields suitable for use with this are scatinfo from the sets table and mattributes from the models table. These are passed as the first attribute; the second being the displayed size of the icons which for the default icons would be a maximum of 48 x 48 pixels. The function is called simply with:

	addkeyicons( $results[16], 24, $dbhandle );

Note

In WACS 0.9.0 and later, addkeyicons should be passed a third parameter which is the handle to the current active database connection. The act of passing this allows the addkeyicons routine access to the attrib database table which contains the extended range of icons and the ability to add locally defined additional icons. Without this being supplied, any of the extended and locally defined icons will appear as a broken image.

	Warning
	Where possible please update your existing code to pass the dbhandle parameter as well.

We're now going to take a look at WacsUI module's most important function, iconlink. It's job is simply to display and icon with an appropriate link around it. Sounds simple enough, doesn't it? Unfortunately it isn't - there's a lot of work that needs to be done relating to permissions, access methods, checking caches and resizing which actually makes it fairly complex. The good news is that the iconlink function will do it all for you!

The iconlink function takes quite a few arguments which control how it works, but they are reasonably straightforward. In most cases parameters are optional and sensible defaults will be used instead if they are not given - obviously things like set number and the location fields (sarea, scategory and sdirectory) are necessary.

print $wacsui->iconlink(
	array( 'type'=>$setdetails[1],
	       'setno'=>$setdetails[0],
	       'sarea'=>$setdetails[2],
	       'scategory'=>$setdetails[3],
	       'sdirectory'=>$setdetails[4],
	       'model'=>$moddetails[1],
	       'resize'=> 0,
	       'silent'=> 'y' ))."\n";

	Note
	Note the silent attribute being set to 'y' - this tells the function not to print the result to stdout. If you set silent to 'n' you don't need to use print iconlink() you can just call iconlink() within your code. Generally it is considered better practice to print the return value from the function call, but with these three functions that choice is yours.

The perl dialect is again very much the same:

print iconlink( type=>$setdetails[1],
                setno=>$setdetails[0],
                sarea=>$setdetails[2],
                scategory=>$setdetails[3],
                sdirectory=>$setdetails[4],
                model=>moddetails[1],
                resize=> 0,
                silent=> 'y' ))."\n";

The thumblink function works very much the same as iconlink does and provides a way to produce thumbnail images from a photoset or any of a number of additional icon images (typically thumbnails from a movie) for a video clip. It is slightly different from iconlink in that since the cache of set thumbnails is organised by set number and not area, category, etc, it needs on the set number, image number and type to function.

print $wacsui->thumblink(
        array( 'setno'=>$setdetails[0],
               'stype'=>$setdetails[1],
               'imgno'=>$imgnumber,
               'resize'=>1,
               'silent'=>'y' ))."\n";    

And of course using it in Perl is much the same:

print thumblink( setno=>$setdetails[0],
                 stype=>$setdetails[1],
                 imgno=>$imgnumber,
                 resize=>1,
                 silent=>'y' )."\n";

The final one of the three link functions, again joining the WACS API reportoire in release 0.9.1, is contentlink. Once again this is similar to thumblink in not needing the full path within the collection as the cache mechanism it refers to is organised by set number. As with the other two members of the link family, it falls back gracefully to the old methods of content delivery if it cannot find a cached version of the desired content, so you can and should use it at all times for content link delivery.

As usual we specify both the set number and the set type, plus you also have the option by using the silent parameter as to whether it should print out the link text it creates or merely return the necessary text as the return variable from the function call. It's also good practice to specify the desired name for the download file using the archive parameter. Normally this name can simply be taken from the sdownload field in the sets database. If this variable is empty, it will default to set1234.zip or set1235.wmv as appropriate.

We do usually specify the srank parameter too, although it will function without it, to clarify the relationship of this set to other things. The ext (for extension) is the file name extension of this file - ie .zip, .wmv, .mov and .mpg . As shown in the example below, passing the scodec field from the database via the getvideoext function should work right for videos.

The one rather odd parameter here is serve - this specifies which type of file you would like on those occasions where there is a choice. For some sets, the cache system holds both an original version and a compilation or edited version comprising either the combination of a number of seperate parts of a video clip, or a video clip with the leading declarations trimmed so as not to disturb the viewing experience. In these cases, if you want the compilation or edited version where are available, you set serve to cooked and where you want the vanilla unaltered file you set serve to raw.

print $wacsui->contentlink(
        array( 'setno'=>$setdetails[0],
               'stype'=>$setdetails[1],
               'srank'=>$setdetails[2],
               'ext'=> $wacsui->getvideoext( $setdetails[3] ),
               'serve'=>'cooked',
               'archive'=>$setdetails[4],
               'silent'=>'y' ))."\n";    

As usual, the perl dialect version of this command is almost identical in how you call it:

print contentlink( setno=>$setdetails[0],
                   stype=>$setdetails[1],
                   srank=>$setdetails[2],
                   ext=> getvideoext( $setdetails[3] ),
                   serve=>'cooked',
                   archive=>$setdetails[4],
                   silent=>'y' )."\n";

	Note
	The content cache, unlike the icons or thumbnail caches, is NOT self-maintaining. You need to take actions to create the cached versions in the first place - please see the administration manual for more information about how to use wacscachectl to do this

The provided simple skin consists of a number of small PHP5 programs and a single large style sheet shared by all the applications. The php programs are:

One of the design objectives of the Wacs-PHP skins project was to make it easy to restyle the pages to look very different without touching the code itself purely through use of Cascading Style Sheets. To this end each page has a large number of named <div> and <span> directives placed throughout the generated pages to provide a framework for this to happen.

The first of these is that every page has a standard core structure to it which consists of three div elements with the following ids: pagebanner for the top heading, navigation for the menu links and maincanvas for the content itself. They will also always be featured in this order. You can of course choose to make them invisible or use javascript to toggle their visibility to make pull down menus and the like.

In addition to the core layout detailed above, there are also a number of div classes (because they often repeat) that are set on each type of icon that may be displayed. For set-based content, these are normmovietile and normimagetile for regular standard sized icons and for the smaller ones (but which are used heavily in the simple skin) imagesettile and moviesettile. For generic styling of the small icons there is also a span class of miniicon around the icon itself.

Moving on to Models, here too there are standard div wrappers around all instances of model icons allowing them to be styled. For the normal model headshot icon, there is a div of class modeltile around the icon block itself, with spans of classes iconmodel and iconmodelname around the icon itself and the text of her name respectively. Around the large model headshot you will find a div with the id of headshot in the girlie.php program which is the only place that Wacs-PHP uses the large format headshot.