chris.turton 0 Report post Posted March 25, 2009 Is there a database definition document (or entity relationship document) available anywhere, as for previous versions of the application / database? I am trying to create a tool that will build a webpage directly from the database and whilst those created by John Cardinal's Second Site package are very good (and I would recommend this tool for most people) they don't match what I'm trying to achieve, specifically with relation to the grouping / ordering of tags and the handling of the image gallery. Any help would be appreciated with this. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Vera Nagel 0 Report post Posted March 25, 2009 Chris, Lee Hoffmann has a description of the TMG File Structure on one of his websites - see http://www.tmgtips.com/dbnames2.htm On the page mentioned above you will also find a link to the Files page of the Wholly Genes website. May be that helps a little and is all I am aware of being available. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Jim Byram 0 Report post Posted March 25, 2009 You'll need to contact Support directly to make your request. There is no document that is 100% current. support@whollygenes.com Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
John Cardinal 0 Report post Posted March 25, 2009 Chris, If you are willing to create a "custom format", you can change the grouping and ordering of tags. That part is fairly flexible, at least within the limits of the data that the main SS program makes available to the formatting code. If you are interested, provide a little more detail about that part of what you want, and I'll let you know whether or not what you want is possible in SS. SS does not support custom formats for the Exhibit Gallery, so you can't alter the structure of the Exhibit Gallery. You can affect the stylistic characteristics, but I suspect you know that already. John P.S. I am not trying to talk you out of accessing the database directly. I will say that there's a lot to it for anything but the most trivial access. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
chris.turton 0 Report post Posted March 26, 2009 Vera, thanks for the link. I had seen Lee's page and this clarified the table structure for me (most of which I'd worked out) but didn't tell me how that connected to each other. Jim, thanks for the suggestion, I'll drop the support guys an email. John, thanks for your suggestion also. I'll have another look at the custom format (it's been a while since I last looked at it). If I can get the individual pages formatted and ordered how I want, I may well just accept the gallery as is. I'll get back to you once I've played a little more. I realize that the database is detailed and has a lot of information in it but with 15 years of working with relational databases in industry, extracting the information I need shouldn't be too complicated once I've worked out haw it all hangs together (foreign keys etc). Any updates I would always do through the TMG application (and associated tools) ~ anything else would be asking for trouble. Again, thanks to all for your input Regards, Chris Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
John Cardinal 0 Report post Posted March 26, 2009 Chris, The relational database is not too difficult, but there are some sub-structures for sentences, names and places (in particular) that are quite involved. Writing a parser for sentences is non-trivial, and there are some similar tasks involved for name and place styles. If you are going to include source information, that's another area where you will spend some time developing the code to interpret the source definitions. TMG offers the GenBridge software development kit, and I think you can access a TMG database through it. I didn't use it in my tools so I don't know the specifics, but if you decide to proceed with your own code, it's probably worth your while to consider that option. You'll have to contact Bob Velke about that. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
