This page describes all the things that can go into the <format> element in the collectionConfig.xml file - or can be added in the Format→FormatFeatures pane in GLI.

Format items include options, parameter defaults, and templates. Templates can include standard XSL, but we have defined a set of gsf elements which are shortcuts to XSL.

<gsf:xxx/> formatting items are converted to XSLT by the web/interfaces/default/transform/config_format.xsl file.

See also the description of format statements, and some sample format statements for miscellaneous tasks.

There are three main types of format items: options, parameter defaults, and templates. Options give you a switch to turn something on/off or change the look, parameter defaults let you change the default value of eg search parameters (stemming, casefolding etc) while templates let you describe what output you want.

There are a few options available. They are specified by adding <gsf:option name="xxx" value="yyy"/> to the appropriate format element in GLI, or in the collectionConfig.xml file.

Inside a format element you can set default values for parameters, using the following syntax

<paramDefault name="matchMode" value="all"/>

You can use this to set things like:

• turn stemming on by default for mgpp collections:

  <paramDefault name="stem" value="1"/>

• return all hits in one page instead of paging the results:

  <paramDefault name="hitsPerPage" value="-1"/>

To see what parameters you have that you can change, you can look at the page source for a query page and see what names and values the form elements have.

These can be added inside the <format> elements for <search> and <display> - using GLI or directly editing the collectionConfig.xml file).

Templates are the containers that hold all format statements. The value of match determines which part of the page content the template applies to. For example, <gsf:template match="documentNode">template definition </gsf:template> matches a documentNode element.

The display format element can also contain <gsf:headMetaTags> element. This looks something like the following, and is used to add metadata into the HTML header of the document page.

<gsf:headMetaTags>
   <gsf:metadata name="dc.Title"/>
   <gsf:metadata name="dc.Subject"/>
   <gsf:metadata name="dls.Organization"/>
   <gsf:metadata name="dc.Author"/>
</gsf:headMetaTags>

This will output META tags for any of these metadata elements present for the document, like:

<META CONTENT="Butterfly Farming in Papua New Guinea" NAME="dc.Title" />

By default, gsf:metadata displays all values of the specified metadata field, for the current page or section of a document. You can change which page or section's metadata is output using the select attribute. And you can choose just a single value using the pos attribute. Or you can set type='collection' to retrieve collection level metadata.

When multiple values are to be displayed, they are separated by ", ", by default. You can change this using separator, suffix and prefix. These can be attributes to the gsf:metadata element, or child nodes. Attributes may only contain plain text, whereas the child nodes can contain HTML. The attribute version takes precedence over the child node version: only the attribute will be used if both are present. See here for an example using prefix and suffix.

Some metadata values can have added formatting applied.

Sometimes you want a table of metadata values. You can use <gsf:metadata-table> for this. The format is like the following: A list of metadata elements, each containing the label that should be used for the metadata.

<gsf:metadata-table>
<gsf:metadata name="Title"><gsf:interfaceText name="Title.display"/></gsf:metadata>
<gsf:metadata format="formatNewLines" name="Description"><gsf:interfaceText name="Description.display"/></gsf:metadata>
<gsf:metadata name="Date" show-if-empty="true"><displayItem dictionary="interface_custom" key="Date"/></gsf:metadata>
<gsf:metadata name="Subject">Subject</gsf:metadata>
</gsf:metadata-table>

Finally, you may want to retrieve the metadata from the server, but not display it directly in the page. Maybe it will be processed by Javascript later on. The page XML will contain metadata values dependent on which gsf:metadata elements are in the XSLT for the page. You can add a hidden metadata to get the value into the page XML.

These will be displayed in the current interface language (if available), otherwise in the default language.

The preprocess attribute specifies something to do to the metadata value before performing the test. For example, you may want to lower case the value before comparing it to your text string. That way you don't need to worry about handling case variation in the metadata value.

Sometimes you may want to output different things depending on the value of the metadata element. There are many tests you can make on the metadata value, listed below, which are specified using the test attribute. They all take a second parameter, specified using the test-value attribute, which is the value to compare to (with the exception of exists, which needs no test value). The preprocessing option, if specified, is carried out first, before performing the test.

Note, these preprocessing and test options are defined in greenstone3/src/java/org/greenstone/gsdl3/util/XSLTUtil.java.

There are many utility functions defined in src/java/org/greenstone/gsdl3/util/XSLTUtil.java. Some of these are used behind the scenes, as part of gsf elements. For example, ….

They can be called explicitly using

<xsl:value of select="util:fname(args)"/>

args is a comma separated list of args. They can be XSLT variables, numbers, strings, XSLT elements/attributes.

For example:

   <xsl:variable name="raw_date"><gslib:collectionMeta name="buildDate"/></xsl:variable>
   The collection was last built on <xsl:value-of select="util:formatTimeStamp($raw_date, 0, 0, /page/@lang)"/>

This code is getting the buildDate timestamp from collection metadata. Then it is formatting it using the formatTimeStamp function. This function takes 4 arguments:

• the timestamp - here we use the raw_date variable we have just made
• an integer for timestamp type - 0 is seconds, 1 is milliseconds
• an integer for output format tupe - 0 is date, 1 is time, 2 is date and time, 3 is days ago
• the language code for which language you want the output in - here we use the attribute from the page element.

We could change this output to days ago: The collection was last built <xsl:value-of select="util:formatTimeStamp($raw_date, 0, 3, /page/@lang)"/> days ago.

Some of these options (<gsf:html>; using <gsf:metadata> inside the parameters for a search link) are not available in the 3.07 release. If you are using 3.07, you can download an updated config_format.xsl file. Rename your current greenstone3/web/interfaces/default/transform/config_format.xsl (so that you can put it back if something goes wrong), and copy this one into its place.