WebAG Automat 9.0 - what is new?

Providing open PL/SQL sourcecode

The WebAG Automat is now delivered in open PL/SQL code. Previous releases had been installed in unreadable wrapped code.

Automat folder export/import

Webmasters can now export Automat-folders along with their subfolders and webpages as an XML-file. You can import such an XML-exportfile into at any Automat-folder. The main applications are:

Duplicate folder trees: You can export and import within an Automat-database in order to work on a copy of the folder tree. The copy can be provided with read only restrictions for some authors. In this way, you can prepare a new structure of your website. After finishing your work, you can copy the new folder tree using the new import function back to its original location and put into operation.
Development sites: You can prepare your website on a development server. To launch the site on the production server export the entire folder tree of the Automat web and import it into a web on the production server.

The import function has a test mode in which you can examine the contents of an export file before importing it. The test function warns you if not all conditions are met for the import into the destination folder. Examples of such warnings: The export file contains Web sites in German and English, but the target website manages only German. Or: A website has exported catagories that do not exist in the target web. You can fulfill the missing conditions in the target system requirements (e.g. assign languages to create missing categories), and ensure through rerunning the import-test that the import can run without error.

The export files contain not only all the content and meta-information of the exported folders and web pages, but also the contents of the uploaded files in the folders. These BLOBs are written into the XML export-file as base64-encoded strings. This procedure may result in very large XML-files. Therefore, before you export a list of the files sorted in descending order by file size. You can decide up to what size files will be included in the export XML file. This is to prevent that large files may hinder the processing of an export file.

Develop interactive webpage-includes using PL/SQL

Dynamic page elements - such as navigation bars - are developed as PL/SQL-functions and then embedded into the HTML-trigger or -stencil as AUTOMAT_INCLUDEs. From now on those PL/SQL includes can send user input back to the Automat webpage. You can now embed forms into the website and you can send the form data back to the Automat's webpage. Before Automat 9.0 this was not possible because the PL/SQL-procedure to display an Automat webpage wt_show.text_page can only receive a fixed amount of cgi-parameters and therefore it was not possible to send any of your own form fields to this procedure.

This problem is now solved by the new procedure wt_show.post_page. This procedure is to be specified as the form's submit-target or by link-targets in AUTOMAT_INCLUDEs. It has a flexible parameter-interface - so you can pass any parameter name. The procedure wt_show.post_page simply redirects to the Automat-webpage - but before it stores the parameter names and -values in a temporary session-table. When running the AUTOMAT_INCLUDE-PL/SQL-Code on the next webpage you can read these parameter values and use them to generate the content of the dynamic parts of the page.

As an example, the Automat 9.0 provides a new search function that can be embedded as AUTOMAT_INCLUDE in the HTML code of a stencil. The stencil for the new search-page just needs this Automat-include-code:

<AUTOMAT_INCLUDE TYPE="FUNCTION"> wt_show.include_search </AUTOMAT_INCLUDE>

Mehr Informationen

WebAG Automat - Introduction
Version history

For more information please contact me.

Martin Friemel
info@webag.com