StoresWWW Maintenance Docs
StoresWWW Maintenance Docs
The StoresWWW is a collection of web pages and perl scripts for facilitating online viewing of inventory and ordering from the Physics Materials and Electronics Stores. It is currently distinct from, although integrated at some level, with the PhysStores application providing point of sale, inventory management, etc.
This page describes some aspects of maintenance of the application which is the responsibility of store keepers and or billing.
There are currently four parts of this project:
This is just a basic html file with a form, going to a basic backend script which sends email out to the storekeeper and fund coordinator with information for the requested sale. Emails will only be sent to addresses within the @*.umd.edu domain. Note: as of migration from NDS (July 2006), there are no fund coordinator emails in the system and so no email is sent to fund coordinators anymore.
The text on the original form is part of the static html file, and may be modified by Reka. Text you see after hitting the submit button is generated by the script, and you need to contact PCS to have any changes made.
The first and last name, phone number, and email address of the purchaser is required, though currently only check that something was entered. Also the FRS number and department are required. The FRS number is checked against a list of valid FRS numbers generated each morning.
For each part ordered, we require the part number, quantity, store, and description fields to be filled. Sizing information is also required if a materials store order request is made. For security reasons, certain characters are elided from the fields; however, as single and double quotes are frequently used in sizing information, single quotes are allowed and double quotes get converted to two single quotes.
Every morning a cron job runs which connects to the database, and gets a list of FRS accounts valid for use in the Physics Stores. These are written to a file and any online sales require the FRS number to be in that list or an error page will be produced.
Billing can modify this list by using the PhysStores/TimeSheets application. Any changes to the FRS table will not take effect for online orders until the next morning.
Every morning a cron job runs which connects to the database and obtains a list of all inventory items in both stores. From this, a collection of web pages are generated. For each store, a page of all parts listed by part number is produced. Also, the part descriptions are split up at anything looking like a word boundary, and pages are created for each letter of the alphabet (and a combined version) listing every part containing a word starting with that letter, a sort of index page of all inventory parts by store.
The program that generates these parts indices is rather stupid, and cannot determine which words (or collections of letters) should be indexed on, and as such will try to index on words like 'OF' or 'OZ' (abreviation of ounce) that appear in some part descriptions. This is somewhat annoying, and so the store managers can prevent indexing on certain words or letter combinations by entering the "word" in the file /group/phys-admin/project/StoresWWW/excluded/www/excluded_words.txt, one word per line.
Any changes to the inventory tables for descriptions, etc. made in the PhysStores application will not appear on the web pages until the next morning.
With the migration away from NDS, an active search page on inventory items now also exists. This is an active search, and so changes to inventories made in the PhysStores application will be effective immediately.
The excluded words list does not apply to the search page.
Because some part descriptions end in spaces, the "Ending in" searches may not work as expected. This is not a bug in the application, and the part descriptions in the database need to be updated to remove trailing whitespace.
