
     Publish

To Publish your database, click on the 'Publish' button on the main DataBox form.

DataBox will generate an HTML Web Page for each record in your database. Each page will be approximately 5,000 (5K) characters in size but will vary depending on the amount of data generated on each page. Any image files associated with each record will also be copied to your nominated Publish directory (unless the "Link Images ONLY at upload time" checkbox has been set in the "General Publishing Settings" screen.

(As image files tend to be much larger than any associated HTML page with text information, 5K need not be considered too large for a published page. A 20 mega-byte Web Site could handle 1000 database records where each record contained a single 15K Image file).

DataBox will also generate a Summary page indicating, by Category, how many records are in your published database, and finally a QuickView page for each Category providing a single 'one-liner' of each record in each Category. An optional search engine can be provided for your database either across the whole database or by individual category.

Each page is generated with clickable links providing easy navigation between each record, the Summary page and the Quick View pages.

The Published files will be checked against a copy of the published files known to be at the Web Site server from the last Upload session (if there was one). In this way, DataBox only copies those newly published files from the Publish directory into a sub-directory named "upload".

DataBox can therefore maintain a list of only those files that have changed since the last upload to your site.

You may modify your data and Publish your database as many times as necessary. The new Upload list will be calculated each time by comparing with the list of files known to be at your site.

After an upload session, DataBox will check all of the files at the site (in your nominated sub-directory if one was specified), against the files in the Publish directory held locally. Any old files at the site, not now part of the latest published site will be presented in turn for deletion. You will have the option of confirming whether each of these files should be deleted or retained on the Web server.

Once, published you may click the 'View' button on the main DataBox form. You must identify your browser application the first time you use this feature. Thereafter, DataBox will store this information so you need not identify it again unless your browser changes. The 'View' feature allows you to examine the results of your published database as your customers would see it. You can then modify your settings for fonts, colours and backgrounds in order to come up with the ideal 'image' for your database.

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For further help, please view the appropriate sections.
If there are any areas not covered sufficiently, or you have comments, please e-mail to documentation@simplewebfx.com.

