Guidelines for Providing Information on Offline Database Tables

The database inventory and table info web pages are generated by reading in a cfg file. It is up to the table owner to make sure the information is entered in this file and is kept up-to-date. These files reside in the directory WebDocs/database_inventory. At present, you need to send your file to mdier@bnl.gov if you do not have write access to the WebDocs area.

The name of the file for a table TABLENAME should be all in lower cases, like:

tablename.cfg

No cfg file needs to be provided for the associated VLD tables.

The configuration file can have different sections with subsequent option fields. In this particular case, the file should only contain one section, with a name equal to the table name, again in lower cases. Other existing sections will be ignored. The start of a section is given by its name between square brackets, like:

[tablename]

The option fields themselves are given by the option name, followed by an equal sign, followed by the option value. The option values can be filled with any html code you want. If you want to use multiple lines, make sure that you leave the first character of each new line blank. The config file can contain the following fields:

Field Name Description
provider The name(s) of the person(s) who provided the information in this file
author The name(s) of the person(s) who designed and implemented this table
czar The name(s) of the table Czar(s): the contact person(s) in case there are questions or problems with this table.
delivery_date The date when this table was put into the offline database
type The category your table belongs to. It should be one of the following integers:
1: Detector Construction & Configuration Tables
2: Calibration Tables
3: Data Collection & Processing Tables
4: Database Logging Tables
0: Uncategorized Table
Any other value for this field will be ignored and treated as an uncategorized table. If you think that your table does not fit into one of these, and you would like a separate category, send a mail to mdier@bnl.gov.
description Fill in a description of your table in this field.
offlineuse Describe how these tables are used in the offline software.
validation How are the numbers that are put into the database validated?
autogen If the data gets generated and filled automatically, describe that process, the program and the machine it is running on.
more_info Put links to other pages or documents here.
structure You can put a short description of the columns in the tables here. It is not necessary to describe each column and the order in which you do this can be arbitrary. The column name and description should be separated with "&" and a new column name should start on a new line. Be aware that if your description continues on a new line, it will not show up on the web page. Here is an example:

structure = column1 & a description of the first column
        column3 & the third column
statcaldata
statcalmc
statneardata
statnearmc
statfardata
statfarmc
These fields contain the names of the persons responsible for filling the tables (in most cases this will be the tableczar), the frequency of filling the tables and the method used to do this. This information needs to be filled in separately for the different detector and the data types. The three pieces of information need to be separated with "&". It should look like:

statneardata = Miss X, Mister Y & irregular & manually

Here is an empty example of such a config file, or get it from the CVS repository located in WebDocs/database_inventory. You can also have a look at the information files that are already present in that directory.


Comments: Mark Dierckxsens (mdier@bnl.gov)
Last modified: Wed Mar 2 14:24:48 2005