Re: [Refdb-users] difficulty with refdba

[Markus H. <mar...@mh...>]

Matt Price writes:
 > how it works...  very impressive, very sophisticated.  I was wondering
 > whether it's possible to modify the output of getref -t html... I've
 > looked at the css, that does help.  But mostly I'd like to be able to
 > remove the ID number & some of the paragraph markings, and to put the
 > output into table form (each reference in its own row table cell, &
 > followed by a couple of buttons "edit this reference" "comment on this
 > reference").  I've written some clumsy php which does this already,
 > but I haven't got the energy to deal with complex reference types so
 > it would be way better to use refdb if I can.  
 > 
 >   I just wondered whether there was a straightforward way to do this
 >   or not...  I suppose it would be possible to parse the output using
 >   perl or something, but it somehow seems cleaner to be able to choose
 >   the fields that actually print out...
 > 

There's a couple of options, actually:

- customize (or copy+edit) backend-html.c until it does what you
  need. This is fairly easy, but you'll have to apply your patches to
  each new release (and pray the patches *do* apply...)

- use refdbc to retrieve the datasets as db31x, teix, risx, or
  xhtml. All of these XML output formats are suitable to be
  transformed by a nice XSLT stylesheet to whatever format you desire,
  including straight HTML.

- use the Perl client module and write your custom client in
  Perl. This could use e.g. the risx output and mangle it until you
  like the results. Perl should have an interface to libxslt, so you
  could do the XML->HTML transformation transparently to the user.

If you go down any of these paths, I'm sure the readers of this list
will be interested in the results.

hope this helps
Markus

-- 
Markus Hoenicka
mar...@ca...
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