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How easy would it be to...

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How easy would it be to...
Hi everyone!

We are planning to buy Links for academic purposes (University), as it seems neat, powerful and amazingly cheap.

We have good knowledge of ASP and SQL queries, but don't know much about PERL.
We would have some questions to ask you prior to placing our order. Could anyone please answer ? Thanks in advance.

1. How easy is it to add new colums into the database ?

2. We plan to add a 'keywords field' in the Links databse and allow the user to perform searches on this field. How easy would it be to add this field into the current Links search engine ? Does a plug-in exist ?

3. We also need a new field in the Links database to sort all the links according to another parameter than category. Does anyone know how to do that ?

4. Would these mods imply a lot (costly) work ?

Thanks for your time and have a nice day !

Jeanne L. Bernard

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Re: How easy would it be to... In reply to
1. How easy is it to add new colums into the database ?

Very easy...there is a built-in database management tool called MySQLMan.

2. We plan to add a 'keywords field' in the Links databse and allow the user to perform searches on this field. How easy would it be to add this field into the current Links search engine ? Does a plug-in exist ?

The default search form already searches INDEXED/WEIGHTED fields/columns within the "Links" table. Have you tested the DEMO version of LINKS SQL? If not, I would HIGHLY Recommend doing so.

3. We also need a new field in the Links database to sort all the links according to another parameter than category. Does anyone know how to do that ?

This has been done in most versions of LINKS SQL, so, yes it is possible. You can "sort" your links by configuring the fields you want to sort by in the ADMIN script.

4. Would these mods imply a lot (costly) work ?

Mods, what mods? All your requests can be done out-of-the-box.

Although if you are on a NT server, I presume you are using MS SQL Server, which I think has caused some problems for NT users. Also, CGI/Perl is a CPU HOG on NT servers. Just so that you aware.

BTW: There are comparable programs written in ASP that you might want to look at first...Links to ASP versions can be found throughout the support forum.

Regards,

Eliot Lee
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Re: How easy would it be to... In reply to
Hi,

Expanding on 1, you simply go to Database->Links->Properties and then click on Add New Column. MySQLMan is also included, but will only work on MySQL databases. MS SQL, Oracle and Postgres users can still add columns from the admin.

2. This would be a matter of adding a keywords field and setting an index weight on it to determine the importance in relevance.

3. You can specify the sort order for Links in Setup->Build Options. You can sort on any column name (and in fact it will go straight to the ORDER BY clause so you can put anything your SQL server will like).

4. I can't imagine taking more then 1 hour to do the above (for us to do it would be less then 5 minutes).

Hope that helps,

Alex

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