Modify the HTML pages

If you want to modify the HTML pages, e.g. to let them blend in with your institute's web pages, you can certainly do this, but you have to make sure that you don't break the way how the web interface works. This section shows you how to do this.

You will have to edit two types of files: the static HTML pages and the templates for the dynamic pages. The former do not pose any major problems. All you should do is keep the navigation intact (but you can move the links to a different place of course) and keep the links to the stylesheet refdbq.cssand the javascript file access.js. You can redesign the forms if you wish, but you must not change any of the variable names as these are hardcoded in refdbc.

The templates for the dynamic pages are slightly more tricky. First of all, the JavaScript element has to be preserved. refdb expects the following code in the head templates:

<form action="/cgi-bin/refdbc" method="post">
<input type="hidden" name="name">
<input type="hidden" name="passwd">
<input type="hidden" name="database">
<table border>

and the following code in the foot templates:

</tbody>
</table>
</form>

refdb will create a table header and body which goes exactly between the header and footer parts.