EXT: Book Database¶

What does it do?¶

Book database is a plugin for managing books and magazines in a company or at home. It offers the possibilities of search, input and changing of books and associated data.

Screenshots¶

Search for books in the database¶

The Book Database plugin starts with a search mask. Here you can do a search in the database. Which search mask is used depends on configuration of the value SearchFormStyle in the plugin configuration options. The following “Search Mask” is provided through the configuration of SearchFormStyle =new. This is also the default configuration.

The old Search Mask is still available, if the value for SearchFormStyle is empty.

At first you can choose the radio button “Display All”, which simply displays all items in the database.

In this case the results are ordered by an internal ID. If you hit the button ”Title” the search results are ordered by title.

If you hit the button ”Author” the search results are ordered by author.

The following radio buttons: Place, Category, Publishing Company, Type and Language do an exact search for the selected value from the associated option field.

The above search would display all books which are at the place “Place 2”.

For the other items: Title, Author, Key Words and Content description you can provide a search expression. The values have to be separated by spaces. If you use a plus before a value, this value is required in search results. The search is case insensitive.

The above search would find all books containing the substrings web and progarmming in their title.

If the value begins with a minus sign, this value may not be contained in the search results

The above search would find all books containing web , but not containing php in their title.

If a value starts with no sign and there is more than one value. The serach expression is handled with an or linkage, this means not all values must be contained in the search results.

The above search would find all books containing web and all books containing database in their title.

Another feature for search is the ability to search for whole phrases. If you want to do this, just put the phrase between quotation marks “phrase” or single quotation marks 'phrase'.

The above example shows how to search for the phrase “Basic Web” and produces the following result.

If your search produces no results and the search form is displayed again, the following Message appears.

Input a book¶

To Input a new book you must fill in the required fields, otherwise an error message appears.

The data you already had input isn't lost. It is displayed again. The only thing you have to do is to enter a new place for the book in the input field or choose an existing from the select-box and press save again. If anything is right a new empty input mask appears. If you enter an ISBN for a book, that already exists in the database, the input is rejected with an error message: “This book already exists in the database, but the book is displayed for changing the entry. The same happens if the title and the author are identical to an entry in the database. For the values: Publishing Company, Place, Category, Type and Language you have 2 choices for input: a selection field and a text input field. The value in the text input feld is preferred from these two fields. Only if the text input field is empty, the value from the selection field is stored. If you know the ISBN for a book, you can fill in this in the field labeled ISBN and hit the WWW-Button. The script tries to fetch the information from amazon.de, and provides the values in the appropriate fields, if a book was found.

Change an entry for a book¶

To change a book you can input the ID or the ISBN if you know these, and the book is displayed for change, if it's existing in the database. You can also use the button browse, to browse the db and select an item for change. If you have a large database you can restrict the items to be displayed with input values in the following fields: Title, Author, Publishing Company, Place, Category, Type and Language. Choose the book for change with the butoon Change. If you made your changes, push the button “Submit Changes” and the changed entry for the book is saved. If you want to delete a book, push the button Delete and the book is deleted from the database. Assuming that you know what you are doing, there is no additional question if you want to delete this book.

The “Other Tables”¶

The so called other tables are all tables except the main table. They are used to store: Publishing Company, Place, Category, Type and Language. You can edit the entrys in these tables after pushing the button “Other Tables” in the Input Mask.

In the upper part you can choose one of the other tables, where you want to add, change or delete an item. Below you can add a new item to the selected table. In the lower part the items of the seleted table are displayed, so you can choose an item to change or delete. You can't delete an item, which ID is still used as an entry in the main table.

tx_bookdb_book¶

tx_bookdb_booklanguage¶

tx_bookdb_booktype¶

tx_bookdb_category¶

tx_bookdb_place¶

tx_bookdb_publ_comp¶

If the webserver containing the Typo3 installation lies behind a proxy, the plugin uses cURL to fetch data from the web. This requires that the cURL library must be installed. You must set the constant useProxy to 1 and fill in the correct values in the constant Proxy as shown below.

There are two different page types represented by two Plugin Options. The Code field is no longer used to configure the plugin.

Search - the page for searching the db and displaying the results

Input - the page for insert new books and change of existing books

With the constant ItemDisplayCount you can limit the number of items displayed for search results, browse the database and editing of the other tables. The default value is 10.

You can choose which fields in the input form are required to fill in with the RequiredInputFields constant. The required fields are marked with an asterisk.

In the screenshot the fields title and place are marked as required for filling in.

The default value is a string containing all fields, which make no sense for practice, but you can easily delete the not required fields. With the RequiredFieldsStyle you can adjust how the labels for the reqired fields should look if they aren't filled in.

Another constant provided is ResultFields , which is controlling the fields to be displayed for search results.

With the constant EmptyValue you can set a value to be displayed instead of empty fields. If you change this value in the Typoscript Constant Editor, you must also change this value in the other tables: publ_comp, place, category, booktype, booklanguage, or the old entry for empty fields would be handled as an normal entry.

For the meaning of the other Typoscript constants according to style please look at the section Reference later in this document.

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