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1995-03-26
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AutoBiography version 1.00ß2.
Copyright 1994-1995 by Doug Kalman. All rights reserved.
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
- Introduction -
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
AutoBiography is an advanced User BIO System for DOOR.SYS compatible
Bulletin Board Systems.
Features : Support for up to 1000 database entries.
Each entry can be comprised of up to 30 answers with a
maximum length of 60 characters each.
Copyright : THE ENTIRE CONTENTS OF THE AutoBiography ARCHIVE ARE
COPYRIGHT 1994-95 BY DOUG KALMAN. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
License : YOU HAVE BEEN GRANTED A 30 DAY LICENSE TO TRY AutoBiography.
IF YOU WISH TO CONTINUE USING AutoBiography AFTER THIS
'TRIAL' PERIOD HAS EXPIRED, YOU *MUST* PURCHASE A LICENSE
TO USE EACH COPY THAT YOU WISH TO RUN SIMULTANEOUSLY.
MULTI NODE INSTALLATIONS THAT SHARE A COMMON DIRECTORY
ONLY NEED TO REGISTER ONE COPY. SEE THE FILE REGISTER.FRM
INCLUDED IN THIS ARCHIVE.
Warranty : THIS IS A BETA VERSION OF AutoBiography, THERE IS NO,
ABSOLUTELY *NO* WARRANTY -- USE AT YOUR OUR OWN RISK.
Requirements : A Revision 5 Fossil Driver (X00/BNU/etc.)
A BBS that is capable of generating a 52 line DOOR.SYS.
Limitations : None, AutoBiography is not crippled in any way.
- Page 1 -
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
- Installation -
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Make a directory for AutoBiography.
Copy all the files contained in the AutoBiography archive to this directory.
Add this directory to your path statement.
Set the 'AB' environment variable to point to this directory.
Reboot your computer.
AutoBiography is now installed.
Once you have completed this section you can run AB.
Simply invoke 'AB /L' from the command line.
- Page 2 -
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
- Invocation -
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
AB.EXE is the AutoBiography main executable.
AB.EXE can be executed from any directory as long as the AB system directory
has been added to your path and the 'AB' environment variable has been set.
No batch file is necessary.
AB [/H] [/L] [/N#]
/H Run AutoBiography using handles instead of real names.
/L Run AutoBiography in LOCAL mode only.
/N# This parameter is used to specify the node number in a multi-
node system. If this switch is omitted AutoBiography will
default to node 1.
AB expects to be called from the individual node directory. AB will create
the following files in the directory it is called from.
AB###.LOG This is the AutoBiography log file.
ERRORS.LOG This file is not currently used.
AB will create the following files in it's system directory.
AB.ASW The AutoBiography User File.
AB.IDX The AutoBiography User File Index.
ABUTIL.EXE is a user notification utility. Its main function is to notify
users that the AutoBiography door exists and that they have not yet
completed an entry. ABUTIL is oftened invoked from the systems TOP menu, or
somewhere else so that it will only be executed once per logon.
ABUTIL [/H] [/L] [/N#] [/Tfilename]
/H Run AutoBiography Notification Utility using handles instead
of real names.
/L Run AutoBiography Notification Utility in LOCAL mode only.
/N# This parameter is used to specify the node number in a multi-
node system. If this switch is omitted AutoBiography will
default to node 1.
/Tfilename Specifies the textfile that ABUTIL will display to users who
have not yet created an AutoBiography entry. Do not include
a file extension.
ABUTIL expects to be called from the individual node directory.
If you're running AB with the [/H] parameter then you should run ABUTIL with
it as well.
ABUSER is a user index sorting utility. This should be run during your
evening maintenance event. Its sole purpose it to sort, alphabetically, the
users index file.
ABUSER can be called form anywhere, and makes use of the 'AB' environment
variable to find it's data files.
ABUSER [/S]
/S Sort AutoBiography User File in ascending alphabetical order.
Both the ABUTIL and the ABUSER programs are not required for the running or
maintenance of AutoBiography. If you have no wish to use them then don't.
ABDATA is a non-distributed program that will attempt to repair the
AutoBiography User and/or Index Files. I have only had to resort to using
this program once! If for some reason your AB.ASW or AB.IDX file gets hosed
you'll need to contact me and make arrangements to send me your AB user
files.
The following installation example has been taken from my own RemoteAccess
system. It will not work on your system and is included only as an
installation example. One should also note that all commands and parameters
are case-insensitive and may be preceeded by either the '/' or '-'
character. AB.EXE -H /l IS THE SAME AS aB.eXE -L /h.
Example for running the AB.EXE main executable.
f:\tp\ab.exe /H /N3
The file AB.EXE in the F:\TP directory will be executed using handles
instead of real names. We are calling AutoBiography from BBS node 3.
Example for running the ABUTIL.EXE notification executable.
f:\tp\abutil.exe /H /N1 /TNOTIFY
The file ABUTIL.EXE in the F:\TP directory will be executed using
handles instead of real names.
We are calling AutoBiography from BBS node 1.
The file NOTIFY.A?? will be displayed to users who have not yet created
an AutoBiography entry. NOTIFY.ANS will be displayed to to ANSI callers
and NOTIFY.ASC will be displayed to ASCII callers.
This should be configured to automatically execute just once per logon.
Example for running the ABUSER.EXE maintenance executable.
f:\tp\abuser.exe /s
The file ABUSER.EXE in the F:\TP directory will be executed, user names
or handles will be sorted alphabetically in ascending order.
This should be located somewhere in your maintenance batch file.
AB.EXE and ABUTIL.EXE are complete doors, that is they both are user
interactive and hardware interactive. Both programs will intitialize your
fossil driver and read information about the current user online from a BBS
generated DOOR.SYS file. Both programs will watch carrier and abort back to
the calling BBS on carrier loss. Both programs will also honor the users
time remaining and respectfully drop carrier, after sending a message to the
user notifying them of this. Additionally, both programs are hard-coded
with a 5 minute user time out, and will drop carrier if this is exceeded. A
message will be displayed to the user notifying him of this. I've pretty
much tried to plan ahead for any possible problem that might be encountered
while a user is in these doors.
While a user is online or when executed locally both AB.EXE and ABUTIL.EXE
will display a status bar on the local screen. Using the F keys you can
cycle through 10 different status displays. The status bar uses the bottom
two lines of the local screen by default. Pressing the F8 key will force
the status bar to use only the bottom line of the local display. This helps
simulate what the calling user sees, as most terminal software displays a
one line status bar. F9 is a help screen, F10 turns off the status bar
completely. It can, of course, be turned back on by pressing any other F
key. Keys F1 through F7 give addiotnal information about the online user.
Please note that pressing keys, other than the status bar keys will appear
on the remote callers screen as if they typed them.
I have given you enough information to get AutoBiography installed. The
distribution archive includes a working sample configuration.
Of course this software is so configurable you'll want to jump right into
the advanced configuration. This next section will explain what you need to
do in order to create a personalized version of the software. ALL of the
configuration files can be 100% modified, making AutoBiography one of the
configurable doors out there, additionally all the textfiles are 100%
editable in any ANSI editor.
- Page 3 -
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
- Advanced Configuration -
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
This section specifically deals with customization of your copy of
AutoBiography.
You should note that AutoBiography will expect to find an ANSI and ASCII
version of each supported textfile. So the file GENERAL.A?? actually refers
to two files, one called GENERAL.ANS for ANSI users and one called
GENERAL.ASC for ASCII users. These are the only two emulations that are
currently supported.
GENERAL.A?? : This file will be displayed to users who enter the door and
have not yet created an AutoBiography entry. This file will
also be displayed when a user chooses the main menu command
'G', for general. It is completely editable in any ANSI
editor. Remember to save your changes to both the ANSI file
and the ASCII file.
MAINMEN1.A?? : This file will be displayed to users who enter the door and
have not yet created an AutoBiography entry. This file is
completely editable in any ANSI editor. Remember to save
your changes to both the ANSI and the ASCII file.
MAINMEN2.A?? : This file is almost identical to the MAINMEN1 file except it
is displayed to users who already have completed an
AutoBiography entry. The difference between this file and
the MAINMEN1 file is MAINMEN1 has a 'C', for create, option
and MAINMEN2 has an 'E'dit, for edit, option. The difference
between these function should be obvious.
The above two files are the menus AutoBiography uses. The following MENU
commands are supported. Case is insensitive and capitals are used for
clarity in this documentation.
G : Displays the GENERAL file.
C : Create your entry. MAINMEN1 ONLY!
E : Edit your entry. MAINMEN2 ONLY!
U : AutoBiography User Listing.
L : Look up a users entry.
V : Version Information.
X : Return to the calling BBS.
ENTRY.A?? : This file is displayed when a user chooses the view another
users AutoBiography entry. This file can be fully edited in
any ANSI editor.
EDIT.A?? : This file is displayed when a user chooses to edit their own
entry, and is nearly identical to the ENTRY file. This file
too, can be fully edited in any ANSI editor.
Additionally the files ENTRY and EDIT will parse the following case
insensitive tokens.
@N : Translates to the users full name or handle.
@S : This translates to the users 'User Note'.
%S : This will translate to an answer in the users entry.
This field is probably going to cause some confusion
initially. When the ENTRY or EDIT files are displayed each
%S is replaced with an answer from the users entry. The
answers are displayed in ascending numerical order, so if the
questionaire has 25 questions you'd want to have 25 %S
tokens. It should be noted that textfiles are displayed from
left to right, top to bottom. I strongly recommend that you
study the ENTRY and EDIT files that are included with the
distribution archive, before editing.
But wait, there are also several formatting codes that can be used with
these tokens.
+ : Left justifies the answer.
- : Right justifies the answer.
# : Centers the answer.
And each of these formatting codes can be optionally combined with a field
width. Below are some examples of tokens, codes and field widths.
%+35s : Left justify an answer field, force width to 35 charatcers.
%-10s : Right justify an answer field, force width to 10 characters.
@+40N : Left justify a name field, force width to 40 characters.
@#60S : Center the 'User Note', field, force the width to 60
characters.
- Page 4 -
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
- Advanced Configuration -
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
AB.QUE : This file is the questionaire configuration file. This file
may contain up to 30 questions. The format of a question is
question number, maximum answer length, and question in that
order.
Before getting into the syntax of the questionaire file it should be noted
that their are several tokens that are available.
; : A semi-colon as the first character of any line will cause
AutoBiography to treat any text on that line as a comment.
: A blank line is treated as a carriage return, line feed and
will cause the local and remote display to skip a line.
[color] : You can use any one of 16 color tokens to change the
foreground color of the text, as it's displayed both locally
and remotely. So if you want to change the foreground color
to Yellow you would use the token [yellow], the case is not
sensitive so YELLOW is the same as yELLow and YeLlOw. The
16 foreground colors are listed below.
Black, Blue, Green, Cyan, Red, Magenta, Brown, LightGray,
DarkGray, LightBlue, LightGreen, LightCyan, LightRed,
LightMagenta, Yellow and White.
A color token starts a line and ends a line in the AB.QUE
file, that is it gets its own line and starts at the first
character on that line. This too, may seem confusing at
first but in practice will become second nature quickly.
The actual syntax of the AB.QUE file is very simple. Each question, up to
the maximum (30 questions) needs to have a question number, followed by a
maximum answer length, follwed by the question, of course. To help explain
how this works, lets use an example.
In this example lets assume the question number is one (1) and you'd like
the users answer limited to one (1) character. Let's say you want to ask a
users sex, and you'd like the answer to be in the form of (m/f). A line by
line narration follws this example. Please note that line numbers appear
below only for reference in this example and shouldn't be used when editing
the actual AB.QUE file.
01 ;
02 ; Sample question number 1
03 ; Maximum answer length is 1
04 ;
05 ;
06 [Yellow]
07 Welcome to our sample questionaire. This sample contains one question.
08
09 [White]
10 1
11 1
12 What is your sex (m/f)?
13 ;
14 ;
15 ; End of sample question number 1
Line 1 is a control token that tells AutoBiography to treat the line as a
comment, and not to process it. This line is ignored.
Line 2 is also a control token that instructs AutoBiography to treat the
line as a comment, and not process it. This line is also ignored.
Lines 3, 4 and 5 are also comments.
Line 6 instructs AutBiography to use the foreground color yellow.
Line 7 is will be displayed in Yellow both locally and remotely verbetim.
That is any character ASCII #32 through #255 will be displayed. This
includes tabs, spaces, any punctuation.
Line 8 is blank so AutoBiography will send a line feed and carriage return
to both the remote and local screens. That's verbetim blank -- no spaces,
tabs, etc.
Line 9 is also a color change. The foreground color is now white.
Line 10 tells AutoBiography to get ready to ask question number 1 and write
the users response to the database.
Line 11 further instructs AutoBiography that the users response to question
number 1 should be limited to 1 character in length. This line is actually
optional. If omitted AutBiography will default to the maximum length of 60
characters.
Line 12, at last we're ready to ask a the question. Our question as with
any text in the AB.QUE file is displayed locally and remotely verbetim.
This affords a high degree of customization within a single file with the
only a handful of control codes or tokens to learn.
Lines 13, 14 and 15 are, of course, comments and are ignored.
Included in this archive is a sample AB.QUE, that of course if fully
functional. Please use this file as a guide, or template.
- Page 5 -
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
- Contacting the Author. -
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Coming Attractions! BBS
Node 1 : 908-972-8583 Zoom 14400
Node 2 : 908-972-4159 Practical 14400
Netmail
Doug Kalman @ 1:107/108.0
InterNet
dkalman@metronj.org
US Mail
Doug Kalman
5 Morris Court
Morganville, New Jersey 07751
Voice
(908)536-9709 Eastern time -- normal business hours please
- Page 6 -
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────