by Cacou, added Jul 16, 2006
f it proves useful, I will note here some important news and new features in Inducks (maybe also some completely useless). For now this "blog" of a special kind has no rules.
Fundamental changes are coming, thanks to a whole new structure for the main database. As told on the page http://inducks.org, the Inducks consists in a set of text files that are converted into a database thanks to a program called Dizni. This database is then used by COA to display search results or to simply let users browse through it (the nice image on this page shows it schematically). Although visitors haven't access to the input (text) files, they can download the files produced by Dizni, the internal files (here), and make up their own database or use Inducks as they wish.
Up to now, the database generated by Dizni was not a fully normalized one: some of the information inside the fields had (and still has) a structure that the COA scripts have to decipher and restore back on the web pages. For instance, the appearing characters in a story are given as a list of abbreviations separated by commas, with optional comments put between parentheses. Once this list is parsed, COA adds HTML links when appropriate, and finally displays the result on the web pages. Although this compact format is handy for a user to import into a spreadsheet, it is far less for other important tasks such as searches.
But now everything has changed! Our program produces a second version of the database, which should prove more convenient for COA in the future, the ISV files, a professional, fully normalized database. In the ISV files, character appearances are given in a separate table, with one entry for each appearance (the full, up-to-date set of relations is at the Bolderbast site). This will allow COA to make much more complicate and broad queries and also have simpler codes. It is still a long way to go before the COA scripts that talk to the database are updated, and the visitors can use the new functionality.
In the meantime, the new version of the database can be downloaded at this location which is weekly updated.
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