addedValues Plugin

Applies To

The applies to property of a variable tells addedValues which sort of entities will have values for this variable name. The value is assigned when the variable is created and it may not be altered thereafter.

Gems are Manila uploaded files and their key is GEM number. Members are people who have signed up (joined) the website, normally specified by a member key which is typically an email address.

addedValues supports an enhanced but separate glossary - a table of names which are expanded if they appear in content between double quotes anywhere in the site and their expanded value will replace the quote name quote. Entries in the glossary are called shortcuts, and addedValues can maintain values for variables which Apply To shortcuts. Bibliographies are one example of shortcut variables usage. Manila maintains a glossary for story, picture and gem shorts and the value is always a link to the page or the download file. but the glossary mechanism in Frontier does not require the value to be a link. addedValues shortcuts have expanded values which are generated by a report whose variables are shortcut variables. The default report which it uses is a report option for shortcut reports. Shortcut variables may be grouped, used in forms, reports, queries etc. exactly as message, gem or member variables. Additionally they are entered in a special glossary for the website, they do not appear in the list of shortcuts maintained by the Manila shortcuts page. They can also be expanded using a macro addedValueMacros.shortcutExpand which takes 2 parameters the shortcut name and optionally, a report name, this allows different expansions of one shortcut with different reports.

AddedValues also supports Globals, which can be thought of as the name for a single value (or perhaps a multiple value such as a table) for the whole website.

Variables which Apply To a User Transaction of one group, form a logical record. These can be used to build an input form, passed to a report and processed by external scripts, but the lifetime of each instance of a User transaction is only as long as the dialog with the user, at the end the values are discarded. For more on this topic see User Transactions.

Variables which Apply To Table Template of one group, form another flavour of logical record. These require scripting intervention to assign storage to "rows" of the table, and to store and retrieve the values. Table Templates find their uses where instances of a record need to be retained, perhaps permanently. For example in an online shop. The Cornershop Plugin is one user of this technique. Table Templates provide very general indexed table storage for Manila Developers. For more on this topic see "Table Templates".

One internal use of Table Templates, is Audit Tables. An audit table is an indexable collection of like records or rows. Rows can be added, and searches and reports can be made over the table, but the values cannot be edited. addedValues can also export Audit Tables rows in various formats.

Another internal use of Table Templates is to maintain Search Report Variables. When a search is performed it is sometimes useful to accumulate values of some property of the search hits, for example to locate the maximum height or to sum a set of prices. A multiple valued Search Report variable is a place to accumulate these values, which can be addressed by name in the headers break on headers of search report, or can be the object of "Vector Operators".

Servers which run the cornershop plugin may define variables which Apply To Cornershop Basket. These variables reference values stored in each basket, such as the basket owners' name. Cornershop must be installed before addedValuesPI.install is run before the new value becomes available. (see http://www.baylys.com/cornershopPI/)