WDB Contributed Scripts, Tips & Tricks
S. C. Johnson once said : A successful tool is one that was
used to do something undreamed of by its author.
- and indeed, WDB has surprised me once or twice, with the ease with which
it is possible to add new functionality, or to integrate other tools with
this - and still have it look like a coherent interface to the user.
If you have written a script, or has some tips or trick that is useful
when creating WDB forms - and you want to share them with all the other
WDB users - send them to me, together with a small description, and I'll
add it to this page.
- Share, and enjoy
Scripts
Tips
Tricks
This page is still under construction. Some of the entries below might be incomplete.
textohtml - Convert TeX characters to HTML
Convert TeX style special characters to the equivalent HTML characters.
(not complete - but the most used characters are there.)
ref.:
http://arch-http.hq.eso.org/wdb/html_chars.html
- Usage
- from_db = &textohtml( $val{'...'} );
- Available
- - in the eso_util.pl library.
- Written by
- Bo Frese
Rasmussen - (bfrasmus@eso.org)
toupper - Convert a string to uppercase
- Usage
- from_db = &toupper( $val{'...'} );
to_db = &toupper( $val );
- Available
- - in the eso_util.pl library.
- Written by
- Bo Frese
Rasmussen - (bfrasmus@eso.org)
findfiles - Find full text version of file.
These where the requirements for this script :
Given a large table with document info : document number, title,
author, date, issue, etc., a link to the full text version of the document
should automatically be generated if it is available. Also, the file
can be available in several formats - PostScript, HTML, other formats
might be added later.
No link should be shown if the text is not available - dead end URL's are
not allowed ! The authors shouldn't be bothered updating the database when
the online version of their document is ready (in whatever format) - it
should be enough to simply deposit it in the correct directory.
Each row in the database contains :
- a file column, which describes in which directory structure the
full text version should be if it is available. This is described
using a logical name, so the physical position of the documents are
easily changed.
- a document number
- an issue number (document number + issue number is the unique key)
(Description still being worked on..... )
- Usage
- VLTSWDOC = /wdb/vlt
VLTSWDOC_DIR = /home/ac2c/users/wdb/WWW/vlt
... etc. ...
from_db= &findfiles( $val{'file'}, $val{'doc_no'}, $val{'issue'} )
- Available
- - in the vlt.pl library.
- Written by
- Bo Frese
Rasmussen - (bfrasmus@eso.org)
MattWrap - Genetic sequence formatter
My database has genetic sequence data (amino acids or nucleotides) stored
as text without delimiters. This does not look very nice to view, so
I wrote a short Perl function that I call with from_db to (1) insert
spaces and (2) make it all UPPERCASE because some records are in lowercase:
- Usage
- fromdb = &MattWrap( $val{'sequence'} )
- Available
- Here : (this of course is in the PERL section at the top of the
fdf)
sub MattWrap
{
local($MattIn) = @_;
local($MattLen) = length($MattIn);
local($i,$MattHead,$MattWrapped);
for($i=0;$i <=$MattLen/10;$i++)
{
$MattHead = $MattHead . substr($MattIn,10*$i,10) . " . ";
$MattHead =~ tr/a-z/A-Z/;
}
$MattWrapped = $MattHead
}
- Written by
- Matthew D. Healy
<healy@seviche.med.yale.edu>
?
Your script could be here ....
- Usage
-
- Available
-
- Written by
-
Tips
Formating numbers
from_db= sprintf( "%3.1f", $val{'nights'} )
Printing just the date part of a Sybase datetime field
from_db= substr( $val{'issue_date'}, 0, 11 )
Tricks
Forcing full screen output mode
PERL = $in{'full_screen_mode'}="on" if $key_args;
Send comments to
bfrasmus@eso.org (Bo F.R.)
......... Last update 10/11-1994
.