DEA DATASET REPOSITORY

Latest Changes to the Web Site

Review: April 4, 2001

TABLE OF CONTENTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Login Process

Search Engine

Upload Process

Administration Process

Documentation

Login Process

There were actually 2 different login processes in the previous version of the web site. The first login process was to add a dataset information record and to upload a file related to the dataset record. After the user added and uploaded the information and file, the user was log out of the application. The second login process was for the search engine of the web site, and was the only process that let the user choose to exit or continue in the search engine.

The new version, unified the login process into one, and after verifying the username and password, or registered the new user information; there is a main menu with three different options for the users and four for the administrators.

To unified these two login processes, the structure of the web site was changed to the following:

Search Engine

The new version detected problems with the search engine, particularly with the search criteria for DMU’s, Inputs and Outputs and between years.

These search criterion for DMU’s, Input, Output and Years change to accept different options:

  • Between two limits, Upper and lower limit
  • If only the lower limit is entered, the search engine makes a search of all datasets at least the value of the lower limit
  • If only the upper limit is entered, the search engine makes a search of all datasets with no more than the value of the upper limit

Another search criteria changed was the description search, in the previous version, the search engine searched for the keyword only in the Dataset description. The new version searches for keywords entered in the dataset and application descriptions.

Also, the search engine now only searches within all the dataset that are available to distribution. A dataset is available to distribution if it has all the information entered and a file or files attached to it. The search engine uses the “AvailDist” field on the main table.

Upload Process

The upload process for the new version now changes the “AvailDist” field once all information about the dataset and the file or files had been uploaded to the server. This required for the search engine process that needs this field to be up to date in order to have an accurate results of each search.

Administration Process

Some features were added to the administration process, these are:

  • List of all dataset that have incomplete information or missing file.
  • List of all users in the database
  • Change the list of all records with an additional option to edit the record selected
  • The download controls and Dataset find features were modified to allow the edition of the selected record.

Documentation

All changes and the different screen shots were added to the User Manual version 4 documents. Also, there is additional option on the main menu, so the users can get into a page that have links to doc’s and pdf’s files for the user manual v3 and v4, and this document. This page is also available from the welcome page.