Question

We are welding together two application. A simple status reporting system and a server inventory system. Such that looking at the topic for an individual server you will see all the status report lines that refer to that server. Server names do not make good WikiWords, so the topic names we choose are InfoSERVERNAME, and the link method from the status reports to the server topic is to use the InterwikiPlugin plugin to put in the Web and the "Info" part. So far so good. However this requires of the person filling out the status report to remember to format the name of the server just so or it will not show up in subsequent searches.

What I have been looking for is either a way to take a list of possible names for servers and force them into proper links as the topic is updated (just like WikiWords only from a list, and also during the save stage and not the view, if that makes sense). The idea would be to restrict this function to a few webs, but make searches of those topics return useful links (thus the need to modify in the save vs. the view phase). Also of note, currently most of the data entry that needs this function is done via the CommentPlugin.

Our server naming standard actually has a good chance of being recognized in a regular expression something like this:
[Aa][NnOo][BbMmPpTt][UuVvWwXx][A-Z,a-z]{2,3}[0-9]{1,2}

Note: I have not check the RE carefully, but it shows the idea of a very controlled server naming standard.

Environment

-- DanielMalcor - 12 Aug 2006

Answer

If you answer a question - or have a question you asked answered by someone - please remember to edit the page and set the status to answered. The status is in a drop-down list below the edit box.

You could write a simple Plugin that does the auto-linking based on your regex pattern of your server names. You could base your Plugin on the StopWikiWordLinkPlugin, which does the opposite of what you want.

On "this requires of the person filling out the status report to remember to format the name of the server just so or it will not show up in subsequent searches": Why is this a problem? With a proper search you should be able to find only the topics you need. See options in VarSEARCH and FormattedSearch.

-- PeterThoeny - 16 Aug 2006

FYI - I'm expanding StopWikiWordLinkPlugin to take a list of words to force and a list of words to block. See StopWikiWordLinkPluginDev for more info. I'll update this page when I post a final version (tentatively titled ForceStopWikiWordLinkPlugin ).

-- ClifKussmaul - 13 Apr 2008