findinsite-cd screen configuration

Introduction

You can also use FindinSite-CD in an invisible window to produce HTML results on the web page - see the HTML Results example. For this case, you can set the ResultsLayout parameter to include any HTML, as well as the FindinSite-CD results tags, as described below.

Screen layout - Windows

This picture shows the four main ways of using windows with FindinSite-CD. The second example is the default technique used by the FindinSite-CD-Wizard generated search page.

Click on the example to see it in action (with instructions). The brown arrows show where results pages are shown. (The first and last examples use the supplied fisLight Java applet to do the word highlighting, rather than FindinSite-CD.)

• Popup: this shows any results pages in the same window, ie to replace the FindinSite-CD search page. A popup window is shown to do word highlighting; this contains the fisLight word highlighting Java applet.

• New window: the default technique - all search results are shown in a new window. No popup window is needed.

• Navigation pane in a frameset: in this example, FindinSite-CD is permanently in one vertical pane of a frameset. Results are shown in another pane of the frameset without using a popup window.

• Main pane in a frameset: here, FindinSite-CD is in the main pane of a frameset. Search results are shown in the same pane without using a popup window. However one of the other frameset panes must contain the fisLight word highlighting Java applet.

Screen layout - Colours

These parameters can be used to change the screen colours

• bgcolor is the background colour
• fgcolor is the foreground text colour
• fieldbgcolor is the background colour in the search text box
• linkcolor is the colour used to indicate hypertext links
• selboxcolor is the colour used to draw the keyboard selection box

You can specify the colour in several ways as a Red-Green-Blue triplet or colour name. The following lines show three different ways of setting the link colour to green:

<PARAM NAME=linkcolor VALUE="green">
<PARAM NAME=linkcolor VALUE="#00FF00">
<PARAM NAME=linkcolor VALUE="0.255.0">

Screen layout - Font

The font specifies the font used for all the screen components. See the Font definition for details of how to specify fonts. It is best not to set the font to a bold or italic style.

The default font is Dialog 12pt. Here are some examples of alternative font definitions:

<PARAM NAME=font VALUE="15pt">
<PARAM NAME=font VALUE="TimesRoman 14pt">
<PARAM NAME=font VALUE="bold italic">

Screen layout - Results layout

If you are producing HTML Results then these special tags should be included in your ResultsLayout parameter.

You can change how the search results are displayed using the ResultsLayout and ResultsLines parameters.

ResultsLayout tags
<ABSTRACT>	the page abstract
<B> .. </B>	bold
<BLOCKQUOTE>	move to next line and indent all following lines in
</BLOCKQUOTE>	move to next line and indent all following lines out
<FILENAME>	the page filename
<FILENAME_LINK>	the page filename as a link
<HANGING n>	indent following lines in this paragraph by n units
<I> .. </I>	italic
<NUMBER>	the result number
<P>	move to next line
<TABIN n>	indent next word in by n units eg <TABIN 4>
<TITLE>	the page title
<TITLE_LINK>	the page title as a link
<URL>	the page URL
<URL_LINK>	the page URL as a link
<WORDCOUNT>	the search word count Only available if ReorderResults parameter is set to wordcount.
ResultsLayout text escape sequences
&nbsp;	this text is replaced by a non-breaking space character

Each result is displayed using the same number of lines. If there is more results text than will fit in, then the extra text is not displayed.

The ResultsLines parameter specifies the number of lines of text and the number of empty lines between results. The default setting is 3,0, giving three lines of text with no spacing lines.

The ResultsLayout parameter specifies what information appears for each result. You can use ordinary text as well as any of the tags listed on the right. In the ordinary text   is replaced by a non-breaking space character.

If the <TITLE> tag is used, then it will be replaced by the title of the result page. <FILENAME> displays the page filename, and <URL> the page URL (usually the same as the filename). <ABSTRACT> displays the page abstract (taken from the META DESCRIPTION, META ABSTRACT or the first words on the page).

If <TITLE_LINK> is used instead, then the title will be displayed as a hypertext link. Clicking on the link will display the page. The <FILENAME_LINK> and <URL_LINK> tags work in the same way.

The following table shows different ways in which the results can be arranged, with the default layout shown first:

Example ResultsLayout
<B><TITLE_LINK></B><FILENAME><BLOCKQUOTE><ABSTRACT>	FindinSite-CD Screen Layout screen.htm      How to change the FindinSite-CD results
<B><NUMBER>.&nbsp; <TITLE></B> <URL_LINK><P><I>Abstract:&nbsp;</I><ABSTRACT>	2.  FindinSite-CD Screen Layout screen.htm Abstract: How to change the FindinSite-CD results
<B><TITLE_LINK></B><FILENAME>	FindinSite-CD Screen Layout screen.htm

Here are some examples of parameters that change the results layout:

<PARAM NAME=ResultsLayout VALUE="<B><TITLE></B> <URL_LINK><P><I>Abstract:&nbsp;</I><ABSTRACT>">
<PARAM NAME=ResultsLines VALUE="2,0">


Screen layout - Vertical layout

The standard FindinSite-CD screen is designed to fill most of a browser window, using a standard size of 500 x 300 pixels.

However in some cases you may wish to use FindinSite-CD in a frameset, with FindinSite-CD in a smaller vertical navigation pane and the main information in the bulk of the browser window. See an example of this,

Suppose you use a frameset with a "contents" window for FindinSite-CD and a "Main" frame. The FindinSite-CD target parameter should be set to Main in this case. The layout parameter should be set to vertical so that the Search, Help and Options buttons are placed underneath the search text box.

Screen layout - Results Ordering

Normally the list of results is prioritised by FindinSite-CD so that more important results are shown first, ie where search words are in the Meta description, Meta keywords, title and headings in that order.

The ReorderResults parameter lets you change the order in which results are displayed. The page filename, title, abstract, priority and search-word-count can be sorted in case-insensitive ascending or descending order.

Sorting by search-word-count will slow down searches because FindinSite-CD has to access more information to work out the word count. If choose this option check that searches work at a satisfactory speed on CD.
<PARAM NAME=ReorderResults VALUE="wordcount descending">


For example, suppose you have chosen your page filenames so that each filename includes the date, eg page20010130.htm (January 30th, 2001) then set the ReorderResults parameter to this to show the most recent pages first in the results list:
<PARAM NAME=ReorderResults VALUE="filename descending">


If you cannot use the filename or title for sorting the results, you could use the priority by specifying an integer value between 0 and 255 for the FindinSite-CD custom META phd-spy-priority tag. To have pages with the highest priority shown first, put this for your ReorderResults parameter:
<PARAM NAME=ReorderResults VALUE="priority descending">