Theo Todman's Web Page - Notes Pages
Website Documentation
Website Generator Documentation - Book-Paper Abstracts
(Text as at 11/04/2022 00:01:26)
This document covers1 the following functions performed by clicking buttons on the front screen:-
- Webpages - BookPaperAbstracts (cmdBookPaperAbstracts_Click)
To see the Code, click on the procedure name above.
Introduction
- This function creates the pages – one per Book – that concatenates the Book Abstract with the Abstracts of all its constituent Papers.
- There’s some processing in the generation of the query underlying each page to select the papers:-
- Some Papers appear in multiple Books, and are selected from the Book Comments for those Books for which the Paper doesn’t have the relevant Book ID in it Book column. Consequently, it’s important not to reference Papers randomly in Book Comments.
- I follow this technique to incorporate Book Reviews into the Book-Paper Abstract: see Searle (John) - The Rediscovery of the Mind for example.
- Books with only one dummy Paper (with no Abstract or Comment, and with the same Author(s) as the Book) have the dummy Paper ignored.
- Some Books have too many Papers to be work producing a Book-Paper Abstract for. See, for example, Electronic Papers.
- Book-Paper Abstracts are referenced throughout the website whenever a Book is referenced.
Processing
- cmdBookPaperAbstracts_Click simply calls WebpageGenBookPaperAbstractsWebPages with global variable automatic_processing = "No".
- This, in turn, calls CreateBookPaperAbstractsWebPages, with the table BookPaperAbstracts_List. The creation of this table requires carful documentation!
- The processing commences (if automatic_processing = "No", as in this case) with a dialogue with the user as to what is to be done:
- Table Books_To_Regen is read, and if non-empty the user is asked whether to regenerate the same Books as last time; otherwise the user is asked to replace the rows on the table with other book IDs. The query to be used now (rather than the above table) is BookPaperAbstracts_List_Regen_Old, which is a complex cascade of queries that need documenting.
- The next (and the default) option is Books with changed Books to Papers links, which uses the query BookPaperAbstracts_List_Changed, which relies of the query Book_Papers_Changed to restrict table BookPaperAbstracts_List. The complex query requires documentation.
- Finally, there’s the option of selecting ranges of Books via table BookPaperAbstract_Ranges.
- The rest looks fairly normal, and I’ll document it more fully in due course. There is a lot of re-referencing going on … starting with Zap_Cross_References.
- However, an important issue from a cross-referencing perspective is the header, which contains (amongst other things, and where relevant) the following links:-
- Book Citings: Link (eg. to Searle (John) - The Rediscovery of the Mind - “Books / Papers Citing this Book”) if table Book_Citings_List_New has rows for this Book.
- Note Citings: Link (eg. to Searle (John) - The Rediscovery of the Mind - “Notes Citing this Book”) if query Book_Note_Counts (running off table Note_Book_Links) has rows for this Book.
- Author Citings: Rather crude – potential series of links, under the header table, but examples – eg. Carruthers (Peter) – The Nature of the Mind: An Introduction – only have one link so far. Uses SQL based directly on the Cross_Reference table.
This Note is awaiting further attention2.
In-Page Footnotes:
Footnote 1:
- Or will do, once it has been written!
Table of the Previous 3 Versions of this Note:
Summary of Notes Referenced by This Note
To access information, click on one of the links in the table above.
Summary of Notes Citing This Note
To access information, click on one of the links in the table above.
Text Colour Conventions
- Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2025