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Website Documentation

Website Generator Documentation - Note References & Reading List

(Text as at 28/09/2022 10:24:58)

*** THIS IS NOT THE LATEST VERSION OF THIS NOTE ***

Introduction

• This document covers₁ the production of the ‘References & Reading Lists’ appended to Notes.
• Currently, these are produced in a very convoluted, obscure and – as far as their contents are concerned – non-timely manner, which needs careful documenting before it can be corrected and improved.
• There is overlap with the Cross-Referencing² re-engineering project, both for the obvious reason that cross-references are key to the production of the correct information, and also because ‘legacy’ tables are used. .
• So, how is the list generated? Well, it’s created by the function AddReading_List.
  1. This function is called from OutputNotesWebPage with third parameter “Non-Print”
  2. It’s also called identically from OutputNotesWebPage_Archived but – from a quick look – nothing comes out for Archived Notes.
  3. It’s also called from NoteForPrinting with third parameter “Yes” provided the variable strPrintReadingLists = "Yes".
  4. And, additionally for the parallel Archive Note if additionally Archive_Reading_Lists = True). I’m not sure if all this works as ‘Printable Notes³’ is currently switched off).
• An item is added to the ‘internal links’ banner-table at the top of the Note only if Note_Groups![ReadingList?] = “Yes”. This is not strictly correct, as we’ll see. There’s nothing analogous for Archived Notes.
• The primary data drivers of the ‘References & Reading Lists’ are the tables:-
  → Note_Book_Links and
  → Note_Paper_Links.
• These used to be maintained by
  → cmdBooksToNotes_Click, and
  → cmdPapersToNotes_Click
• For documentation, see Website Generator Documentation - Links & Link-Pages⁴), but this code was commented out as part of my Cross-Referencing re-engineering⁵ project. I’ve now re-instated it, so it appears in the documentation!
• They are probably maintained by the Full Regen⁶, but this doesn’t make for timeliness.
• My specific interest in this matter arose because of Thesis – References⁷ where initially the ‘References & Reading List’ was empty, but then – after a full Website Regen – was a diminutive list with a few items beginning with ‘A’! Something is clearly going wrong.