Table of Contents

Greenstone2 URLs

Actions and Arguments

CGI arguments encode the parameters of each page, for instance, what kind of page to display, what query to carry out etc. This page describes the common actions and arguments used by the Greenstone library server.

a is the main cgi argument and determines which action is used to dipslay the page.

You can set the default value of any cgi argument in the Greenstone\etc\main.cfg file. Add a line like

 cgiarg shortname=a argdefault=p

This will set the default value of argument 'a' to 'p'.

a=p: Page action

Displays 'static' pages, such as home, about, help and preferences pages.

ArgumentDescription
p page type: home, about, help, preferences

a=q: Query action

Displays search form and results, and optionally search history. Many of the options are set from the preferences page.

ArgumentDescription
q query string
c current collection
h index to search (MG collections only)
j subcollection index (if collection has been partitioned)
n language index (if collection has been partitioned based on language)
t search type - if b=0, 0=all, 1=some. if b=1, 0=boolean, 1=ranked
b search mode - 0=simple, 1=advanced
k casefolding - 0=off (case must match), 1=on (ignore case)
s stemming - 0=off (whole word must match), 1=on (ignore word endings)
m max number of documents to return in search results
o how many documents to display per page of search results
r which result number to start from for the current page of results
ccs cross collection searching - 0=off, 1=on
cc comma separated list of collections to search if cross collection search is enabled
hd display X number of search history records. if set to 0, search history is not displayed
qb query box type - 0=regular, 1=large
ifl I feel lucky - go directly to the first matching document instead of displaying the search results
ct collection type - 0=MG, 1=MGPP, 2=Lucene

The following arguments are only available for MGPP and Lucene collections, which provide form searching.

ArgumentDescription
g granularity, or level of search (Doc, Sec, Para)
fqf index to search in. used instead of h arg for MGPP and Lucene plain searching
qt current query type - 0=plain, 1=form
qto available query types - 1=plain only, 2=form only, 3=both plain and form
qf query form type - 0=simple, 1=advanced
fqn query form number - number of boxes to display in the form
fqf query form fields - comma separated list of field selections
fqv query form values - comma separated list of query values
fqs query form stemming - comma separated list of stem settings (advanced form only)
fqk query form casefolding - comma separated list of casefold settings (advanced form only)
fqc query form combiners - comma separated list of boolean operators which are used to combine the query terms (AND,OR,NOT)
fqa query form advanced query - run the query specified by the q argument instead of generating the query based on the fq- arguments (advanced query)

a=d: Document action

Used for displaying documents and classifiers

ArgumentDescription
d the document identifier to display
cl the classifier identifier - will be displayed if d is empty, otherwise it is used to record where in a classifier the document was entered from
gc expand/contract document contents - 0=contracted (normal view), 1=expanded
gt expand/contract document text - 0=contracted, 1=expand unless there are more than 10 sections, 2=expand all
gp goto page - used by page type document navigation
hl search term highlighting - 0=off, 1=on
x detach - x=1 means that the page will open in a new window
xx all document pages should be detached
dm date metadata - indicates the metadata type (e.g. ex.Date, dc.Date) that has been used to build a Date classifier - this is used in the special DateList formatting

Handles displaying documents which are external web pages

ArgumentDescription
el external link preference - prompt=indicate to the user that they are about to leave the library, direct=go straight to the page
d document ID - of page that the link is in
href the external URL to go to
rl link is relative - what does this mean???

Clicking on a link to an external resource from a Greenstone document takes the user to an intermediate page that says something like the following: "External Link The link you have selected is external to any of your currently selected collections. If you still wish to view this link and your browser has access to the Web, you can go forward to this page; otherwise use your browsers "back" button to return to the previous document.”

To get rid of this intermediate page, add the following to greenstone/etc/main.cfg

 cgiarg shortname=el argdefault=direct

You may want to redirect a more convenient URL to your Greenstone cgi program. For example, on our system the URL http://nzdl.org (which is shorthand for http://nzdl.org/index.html) is redirected to http://nzdl.org/cgi-bin/library . The Apache webserver accomplishes this with the Redirect directive. Along with other directives, this goes into the C:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache\conf\httpd.conf configuration file. To redirect the URL http://www.yourserver.com to http://www.yourserver.com/cgi-bin/library , put this line into httpd.conf:

Redirect /index.html http://www.yourserver.com/cgi-bin/library

Then you will reach your digital library system directly from the URL http://www.yourserver.com . Instead, if you wanted a URL like http://www.yourserver.com/greenstone to be redirected to http://www.yourserver.com/cgi-bin/library , include in the httpd.conf file

Redirect /greenstone http://www.yourserver.com/cgi-bin/library

If your computer doesn't have a domain name (like the “www.yourserver.com” above), just replace www.yourserver.com by localhost in the lines above. So long as the browser is running on the same machine as the webserver—which it surely is if your computer doesn't have a domain name—this has the same effect as the above redirections.

Instead of putting redirect directives into the file httpd.conf, you can equally well put them into a file called .htaccess within your server's document root directory. In fact, doing so has two advantages. First, changes to .htaccess take effect immediately, whereas you have to restart the Apache webserver to see the effect of changes to httpd.conf. Second, on Unix systems you usually have to be logged in as the “root” user to edit httpd.conf, whereas you don't to edit .htaccess.