Directory Help

A Brief History

The "Search Departmental Listing" button accesses departmental listings for faculty and staff. This is the information listed in the "Departmental Listings" section of the paper directory. WAIS stands for Wide Area Information Server and is a search and retrieval protocol which was around before the Web.

How to Search

Enter a name, email, phone, etc. to get a listing of all entries in the directory that contain your search string. Searches are for "words". A word is defined as alphanumeric characters delimited by white space or non-alphanumeric characters. For example, if you want all entries with the phone number 491-7560 in it you should NOT enter 491-7560 since the search will find all entries with 491 and all entries with 7560. Since there are so many entries with 491 just enter the 7560. Entries with the most occurrences of all the words will be listed first. A search will currently not return more than 500 entries so you should add enough words to raise the desired entries to the top.

Your Own Web Search Page

CWIS users that have "wais indexed" files produced with the "waisindex" command can create their own web search page of this data. These files have been accessed in the past with gopher so you may need a review on using the waisindex command by logging into yuma and entering the command "man waisindex".

Your web to wais search page requires a form. The form should look like this:

 
< FORM METHOD="POST" 
ACTION="/cgi-bin/wais.pl?waisd+index+header+footer">

Enter the word(s) to Search for:
< INPUT TYPE="text" SIZE="25" NAME="String">


< INPUT TYPE="submit" VALUE="Search">
</FORM>


where    "waisd" is the directory containing the indexed data.
         "index" is the base file name for the index files.
	 "header" is header html for the search results page.
	 "footer" is footer html for the search results page.

All parameters to wais.pl follow the ? and are separated with a +. The header and footer are optional and if specified, must be located in "wasid" with the correct read permissions. If the header is not specified but footer is then you must leave a place for the header. If a header and footer are used these files should contain enough html for a valid web page.