Theo Todman's Web Page - Notes Pages

Website Documentation

Website Generator Documentation - Site Map

(Text as at 03/07/2020 22:09:07)

• This document covers₁ the procedures for generating the three views of my Site Map, namely:-
  → Alphabetic List
  → List by Sub-topic
  → List by Sub-topic using Javascript
• It isn’t a complete site map; just edited highlights from a manually-created list.
• Also, it’s not automatically generated, though the three views above are generated from the same data.
• I found that I couldn’t generate the JavaScript from within MS Access as – somehow – the Javascript code interfered with the VBA. Maybe there’s a way round this, but when I first created these pages in 09Q1 I couldn’t find one, so used Excel instead.
• Nor, presumably, could I in 14Q1 when I did the last update. Now (in 20Q2) I can’t remember how it’s supposed to work – hence this documentation!
• Another – admittedly fairly easily fixable – defect is that these pages don’t use CSS, so there’s lots of hand-crafting.
• The Excel workbook is the “Site Map” tab of my time-recording Workbook.
  1. The instructions to generate the HTML pages are in the following cells:-
     1. H1: SiteMapAlpha - Sort Rows between yellow and bottom green (exclusive) on Col C, and select for copying between Green rows (inclusive)
     2. J1: SiteMapTopic - Sort Rows between yellow and bottom green (exclusive) on Col B, and select for copying between Green rows (inclusive)
     3. T1: SiteMapTopic_J - Sort Rows between yellow and bottom green (exclusive) on Col B, and select for copying between Green rows (inclusive)
        
  2. Various cells contain commonly used strings, referred to passim. I’ve ignored the cells that are concatenations of other cells:-
     1. Column G:-
        1. G5: The HTML tags for the standard width and bgcolor of the cells in the “link” column of the tables.
        2. G11: Closing hyperlink tag.
           
     2. Column H:-
        1. H4: Paragraph opening tags for table rows.
        2. H6: “→” encoded.
        3. H7: Opening hyperlink tag.
        4. H8-H10: Three tags to define the window hyperlinked results are displayed in (Main_Text, Top and Blank).
        5. H11: End table-cell marker.
        6. H12: Definition of the “Comments” cells.
        7. H14: Table-row end-tags.
        8. H15: “Last Updated” page-footer.
           
     3. R18: The footnote appearing in SiteMapTopic_J explain the use of Javascript.
        
  3. Otherwise, the columns are used for the following purposes:-
     1. Entry sequence: ignored?
     2. Structure Number: See below
     3. Title: Title of page as it appears in the Topic Structure
     4. Link: Directory link (from the site root directory) used to generate the HTML hyperlinks to the relevant pages.
     5. Page: No idea! Almost all rows have “New” in them. Not sure if this is used.
     6. Ign: Means that this row has no hyperlink, but is just used to group items below it in the Topic structure.
     7. Comment: The narrative that appears against the item in the HTML table.
     8. Data for SiteMapAlpha:-
        1. Row 15 and above: various standard strings used in Excel concatenations to generate the HTML code.
        2. H16: HTML for Page Header.
        3. H18: HTML for Table Header.
        4. Row 19 and below: Generated strings making up the HTML code for the table rows.
        5. Bottom Row: HTML for Table and Page Footers
           
     9. Null column (spacer)
     10. Data for SiteMapTopic:-
         1. J16: HTML for Page Header.
         2. J18: HTML for Table Header. Link to H18.
         3. Row 19 and below: Generated strings making up the HTML code for the table rows.
         4. Bottom Row: HTML for Table and Page Footers. Link to corresponding cell in row H.
            
     11. Interrogates Structure Number: Generates “1” if an integer, else “0”
     12. Interrogates Structure Number: Generates “1” if an integer or one decimal, else “0”
     13. Interrogates Structure Number: Generates “1” if fewer than 3 decimals, else “0”
     14. Sums the values determined in Cols K-M in this row and all rows above. This incremental number is used to generate the HTML IDs used by the Javascript of the form id="yx", suffixed with this value
     15. Flag: “Yes” or blank. Used in column Q to generate a Javascript opening toggle if set to “Yes”.
     16. Flag: “Yes”, “2-Yes” or blank. Used …?
     19. Formula using column P to add 1st-level (“Yes”) and 2nd-level (“2-Yes”) Javascript closing tags for the pop-up lists. They are on the row following the end of such lists (when the sheet is sorted in topic order).
     20. Data for SiteMapTopic_J:-
         1. T2: HTML for Page Header. Link to J16.
         2. Rows 3 – 17: Javascript header.
         3. T18: HTML blank row (not sure why needed).
         4. Row 19 and below: Generated strings making up the HTML / Javascript code for the expandable structure.
         5. Bottom Row: HTML for Page Footer.
            
  4. Structure Number: This is a decimal number providing topic groupings and (sub-)(sub-)groupings.
• The Javascript – which I found on the web and don’t fully understand – is:-
  
  
  function Toggle(item) {
     obj=document.getElementById(item);
     visible=(obj.style.display!="none")
     key=document.getElementById("y" + item);
     if (visible) {
       obj.style.display="none";
       key.innerHTML="[+]";
     } else {
        obj.style.display="block";
        key.innerHTML="[-]";
     }
  }
  
  
• My intention is to replace this with – predominantly – Access tables, queries and VBA once I know what it’s doing!