Generating an Index Page

Hello,

I would like to generate an index page for a set of DCR's. What would be the best way to do this? I would lilke this list
to have a link to a generated page and also display the title, and a short description (which was provided in the dcr at creation time)

Thanks in advance!

Muneeb Bokhari
muneeb@weddingchannel.com
www.weddingchannel.com

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Migrateduser

When I've done such things in the past, I've usually done it by creating a presentation template that had would programmatically iterate over the DCRs and grab the appropriate data to put on the index page. Then you can invoke iwpt_compile.ipl on that presentation template in a workflow whenever one of the DCRs you want to index is submitted. If you wanted the users to have some control over what order the indexed files appear in, you could great a DCT that populated some selects with an inline that iterates over the DCRs, checks a DB (if you are deploying their data with DD) or what not.

elined

Thanks for the reply. What about the links? It doesn't seem that from the DCR I can determine which link to use...
Can I iterate over a bunch of generated pages and retrieve the DCR from them? Or is there a way to get the links I need
from the DCR itself...

Thanks!

Dwayne

I would like to generate an index page for a set of DCR's

Wouldn't we all.

The truth is that there's no built-in way to do this. And I doubt that anyone here has the free time to build a solution for you. That's what consultants are for.

I can give some general guidance:

You'll need some sort of persistant method of mapping DCRs to the generated page. TS doesn't do that for you, only the other direction (the generated page back to the DCR). That method could be an EA applied to the DCR, it could be a database, or it could be programming logic, if your generated pages are always built via a workflow, rather than having the user do it.

You'll need some method of ordering the pages in the index. Last modified date order is popular. So is giving a date field within the DCR, and sorting on that. I've also seen sorting alphabetically, as well as by the order of the DCRs in the directory. I personally don't like those, but they work for some people

You'll need to decide which DCRs get included, and which don't (unless it's all, of course). Popular techiques: put a field in the DCR, specifying if it should be included or not; limiting by date (e.g. only those DCRs one month old or less); have a "master dcr" which is just a big replicant where (usually an admin) user can choose which DCRs to include. This can also handle the sort order question, but it's less automated.

You'll need to decide what to do when the list of DCRs gets big. Let the page grow longer and longer? Break it up into multiple pages? Limit it to the top "n" DCRs?

Once you've decided which DCRs to include, you can finally get into the technical questions of how to actually generate the page. I tend to use a presentation template, with a lot of use of <iw_load_dcr> tags, but you could also do it via some program you wrote in perl or java or vb or whatever.

As you can see, there's a lot to consider around this request. And this isn't an exhaustive list. It's just what I've come up with off the top of my head, remembering other engagements where I've had to do things like this.

--

Current project: TS 5.5.2/6.1 W2K

Adam Stoller

Generated pages have TeamSite Templating EA's assoicated with them that will allow you to programmatically retrieve the DCR from which they were generated (assuming "standard" page generation) but it's a bit expensive calling iwextattr all the time to do this.

On the other hand, if you have a consistant naming scheme where sub-directories of data/ mirror sub-directories of the root of the workarea (or similarly identified root dir) which mirror the directory structure on your web server *and* you name your generated pages based on the name of the DCR - you could programmatically determine the URL for the generated pages based on the full path to the DCR (which your PT can figure out easily)

You can also have your normal PTs set EAs on the DCR when the pages are generated to point to the files that were generated - and then you can look at the EAs on the DCR to find the URL (again, paying the price for running iwextattr multiple times).

There are plenty of ways to do all this - what's important is that you *design* your solution so that *you* understand what you're doing and then the implementation will be easier to accomplish.

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com