Webtags (preserving history): Difference between revisions

#At the last count, a 3.5.x version of MX produces ''nine and a half million'' '''web tags'''! But the file mentioned in previous section contains just 717 items (later versions of MX raise this count by another forty tags or so). How come this discrepancy?

*Well each web tag has the general format <tt><#tag_name optional_input_parameter optional_output_parameter></tt> and it is adding thesethe optional input parameters that allow 717 tag names to define 9½ million values!

*A score of input parameters that modify some of those tags (meaning some web tags can represent 12 different months for example)

*The components that make up output parameters that(a modifyguide almostto allhow webyou tags that report amodify timethe and/oroutput dateformat)

The tables below are not able to indicate which of the billions of combinations possible are valid or invalid for youparticular tag names nor for particular release versions..

The tip at the start of this article tells you how to check which tags are available in whatever build of Cumulus you are actually using. Given how often a new release alters either what web tags are available or what parameters can be used with particular web tags, it is not possible for the tables below todo tellnot youlist precisely how you useall web tags at any version, and the tables can't say which modifiers are available at your version.

Because Cumulus 2 is no longer available, it has been ignored in the tables below. It never really worked for web page generation, so if you happen to have installed Cumulus 2 from when it was available, you probably don't care which web tags it supports.

*SomeThe newer web tags for '''today''' include a "T" as a suffix, somethe older ones do not.

**The lack of a "T" isin usedsome intoday combinationtags withcauses thesome webconfusion tagwith nameall-time forrecord atags as value,they sohave a similar namenaming isstructure usedto forthese theolder time-stamptoday web tags.

**This is particularly confusing and is why you must look up time-stamp tags in the tables in this article.

* the reserved characters changeare different betweenin C1 and MX (affecting use of literals like "on" and "at" whichthat areappear in many commonlyEnglish requiredtime-stamps)

* MX introduces the concept of escaping characters (a '''\''' placed before a character can be either a control sequence or an instruction to display the character)

|{{Version badge 1}}Cumulus 1.x.y: Displays the date using the format given by the Short Date format. [[File:Badge vMx.png]]TheThis MX parameter cannot(when beon combinedits own) displays inconsistent behaviour as its effect depends on the tag name with anywhich it is used other(see parametersexamples).

|e.g. '22/03/2019' (British Locale) produced by {{Version badge 1}}<#metdate format="ddddd">[[File:Badge vMx.png]]<#metdate format="d"dddd>

|Displays the offset of any time from UTC in hours and minutes

You may have used GET as an attribute when defining the action of a HTML form. Equally you might in a script language access the query-string part of a Universal Resource Locator to get parameters for what the script is to supply to the web page. Even if you don't understand the meaning of those technical terms, you probably have seen when using a browser (in the box where a URL is entered) that sometimes the URL seen there has a query-string. You will have seen a question mark (?) followed by one or [separated by ampersand (&)] more '''name=value''' parameters.

The GET approach to using the Cumulus general api works in this way indicating the start of a query-string with a question mark and using ampersands to separate names. The difference is that a tag name (or list of tag names) is used instead of a name=value parameter (or list of name=value parameters). However, when the Cumulus api returns the values they will be in attribute=value format. Therefore if (like example below) you are coding in JavaScript, what is returned is a JavaScript Object and you extract the values by specifying the Object name and the Attribute name. If that technical terminology confuses you, look at the example.

Remember that in thiscurrent version (and some earlier versions) of MX, the above three web tags are exactly same as:

Since '''rc=y''' can be applied to several web tags that don't appear in [[Webtags#No_Commas]] table, this shows how the api can access values without commas for manyall otherthose web tags that report in real numbers and allow that output modifier.

If you are using the api in a context where it does not matter if decimal commas or decimal points are in the api or for any tags that don't report in real numbers, simply omit the '''rc''' as first item, and just include tag names separated by ampersands.

I wanted to improve the log file editing pages, and that was partly by adding validation, and partly by changing the way the editing is done. For the standard log file editor I wanted to achieve even more, I added a script to calculate (and recalculate after any edit) the derived fields from the source fields. To make these calculations work for anyone, I needed to find out what units the Cumulus MX user is using. Before 3.7.0 release the snippet of script that obtained the units via various api calls was quite complex (I described above how the api returned lots of unwanted content), but with 3.7.0 itmy new api call was greatly simplified to what I show below. Please note my revised log file editing scripts did not make it into a public release, and it is only the units obtaining api that I am making available to public here.

*The function takes as its sole parameter an Object (a JavaScript Object is a collection of properties), this is what is returned by the api, thean selected nameobject can be given any variable name

*WeThe JavaScript '''refinement''' syntax (starts with a dot) can be used to find the value infor any parameter bywe usingname. We assign the '''object.attribute'''variable syntaxalready defined to the object and assignits itrefinement to(that specifies the variableattribute alreadywe definedwant).

*The console.log command simply outputs all the items in the list within the brackets into the browser console that in many browsers is displayed by selecting '''F12''' on the keyboard. I included this instead of the lengthy rest of my code that uses the units to do the various calculations correctly.

The word "Post" in a computer environment means that the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) used by the internet is being asked to transfer information enclosed in the body of the request message. Put slightly less technically in this approach you produce a text file with the details of what tags you want and send it to the api server. I suppose it is a bit like sending an email, its header (subject, author, date sent) is easy to view, but you need to open it to see what text is in the body.

*The parameters are not shown in theany query-string, so are not obvious to the person looking over your shoulder, nor do they appear in a history list of sites that the browser has visited.

*If you fill out a form online, the post approach will be used as the content needs to be kept secure. The get approach may be seen when you are navigating through a web site, and a selection is being remembered.

!|<#DavisTotalPacketsReceived>

!|<#DavisTotalPacketsMissed>

!|<#DavisMaxInARow>

!|<#DavisNumCRCerrors>

!|<#DavisNumberOfResynchs>

!|<#DavisFirmwareVersion>

!|<#THWindex>

!|<#THSWindex>

!|<#battery>

!|<#txbattery>

!|<#StormRain>

!|<#StormRainStart>