DataBox allows you to nominate an area on your disk where your database can be prepared for publication.
In addition, you may want to modify the default publishing template.
By clicking the 'Setup' key in the Publish Control box at the bottom of the DatabBox screen, you will be presented with the Publish Setup Form.
At the top of the form, you specify your Internet connection details. It is assumed that you will have a defined network address for your Web Site and have been provided a User ID and Password by your Internet Service provider (ISP). Enter these details in the appropriate boxes as provided to you by your ISP.
(The Port number will also be advised by your ISP, but is nearly always 21.)
For Web developers who have their own FTP Server software, you may use the local address of 127.0.0.1 - provided you have your FTP Server running.
You may also nominate a sub-directory that DataBox will create and change to on your ISP server once connected - before uploading any files. You can only nominate a path containing multiple sub-directories provided the directory already exists on the server. These connection details will only be used when an attempt is made to 'Upload' your files to your Web Server (see the Help section on Publishing).
The rest of the Publish Setup Form is dedicated to the style and colour of your published database - with some default coloured pattern image files provided by SimpleWebFX.
Page background:
Firstly, you can nominate the background colour (or specify a background image file) for the Web Page that your database table(s) will be published on. If you select, the Image option from the pull-down list, you will be expected to enter a valid Image file for your page background.
Table heading:
You may specify either a Heading for your published database (with a user nominated font, style, size and colour) - which will appear at the top of each record, or you may specify an Image file that contains your heading.
Table background:
You may specify a colour or an Image file for the background of the table used to display each database record, the QuickView screen and the Category summary pages.
Some Instructions are automatically included in your published database - The font, size, style and colour of these instructions can be set here. (Note, the font details of the descriptive labels, the data fields and the scroll-box can be set independently on the Main DataBox form).
You must specify a directory where your published database files will be prepared. When first installed, DataBox will have a directory named 'Publish' under the installation directory. Each time you click the 'Publish' button, previously published files beginning "sfx" will be removed from this directory before being re-created based on the current database.
If you plan on maintaining multiple databases, you must create separate publish directories for each and identify them separately with this form having loaded each database in turn (remember to save your changes for each database).
DataBox will create sub-directories within this directory to handle Uploading your published database files. You can optionally copy additional Web Site files into the publish directory if you would like DataBox to include these in managing the uploading of your site (recognising only those files that have changed since the last upload). Provided your files do not begin "sfx", DataBox will not remove them from the publish directory each time 'Publish' is clicked.
You may also identify whether any images in your database are to be published to "scale" such that each image occupies the same physical box size in each published record, or, whether the images should be published in their original size without any scaling. Please check your published results for both options to determine which mode is better for your images.
Finally, you can nominate which of the 20 fields in your database should be used to create the QuickView summary screen. Specify each field number in any order, each separated by a comma (no spaces).
Eg.
1,2,3,4,5
20,5,4,2
etc.
NOTE: Clever use of naming the Field Labels can assist in presenting a clear QuickView page. The width of each column is based upon the width of each label.
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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.
