[OpenMadrigal-developers] New Madrigal inventory and experiment pages

[John Holt]

I have draft versions of new Madrigal inventory and experiment pages
running on chaos:

http://chaos.haystack.edu/cgi-bin/madrigal/madInvent

The 01/06/97 ARO experiment includes most of the features discussed below.

Changes include the following:

1. No, I don't like the green background. Since I regularly install
Madrigal on chaos and my Linux laptop, I use disgusting backgrounds on
these so that I won't get confused about which Madrigal installation
I'm using.

2. The inventory page now has an option to chose whether or not to
display history files, eg. the output of old inscal runs. Previously,
only Millstone history files could be viewed through some
Millstone-specific code.

3. There is no longer any Millstone-specific code.

4. The experiment display page now reads the metadata tables instead of
holdings.arr. As a result, it is able to provide new information about
Madrigal files, e.g. the data type.

5. Several previously available options under the listed Madrigal files
are not available. I do not display ISGrapher because it is not working
at this time. Tony is working on this, and I will add ISGrapher as soon
as it works.

6. I do not display the Overview because it requires special code, is
not defined anywhere to my knowledge, and is generated by software
which requires madrigal_holdings_procs2000.0 and, at least in the case
of the Haystack Madrigal installation, runs only on cyclops, which is
no longer online.

7. Isprint is still accessible.

8. I also offer an option to display a summary of the file contents.
This includes a one-line-per-record listing and some additional summary
information after the record list. There are some cosmetic issues here
that I will fix, and any ideas for improving the summary are welcome.

8. I display by title any index.html file in any subdirectory of the
experiment directory. The previous script only displayed index.html in
the plots subdirectory. As before, any html file in the experiment
directory is displayed by title.

9. I have added links to two external LTCS pages to the Arecibo
experiment.  I used a redirect with a two-second delay to prevent
problems with using the back button to return to the experiment page
after viewing the external page. Any suggestions for a better way
to handle links to external Web pages?

I've tried to use descriptive terms rather than mnemonics as much as
possible, but I think pop-ups would be a nice addition, eg. to define
"default file". I've always avoided Javascript and don't know much
about it. Am I right in interpreting Bill's posting to mean that
properly written code should run correctly on most browsers?


John