Re: virtual documents

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Errors-To: sanders@bsdi.com
Errors-To: sanders@bsdi.com
Message-id: <9307071737.AA09164@austin.BSDI.COM>
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: virtual documents 
In-Reply-To: neuss@igd.fhg.de's message of Wed, 07 Jul 93 18:28:47 +0200.
Errors-To: sanders@bsdi.com
Reply-To: sanders@bsdi.com
Organization: Berkeley Software Design, Inc.
Date: Wed, 07 Jul 1993 12:37:17 -0500
From: Tony Sanders <sanders@bsdi.com>
Status: RO

> Ron D. Appel (appel@cih.hcuge.ch) writes:
> > In several papers, I have read about virtual and real documents.
> > How does one build (and send back to the client) a VIRTUAL DOCUMENT, for 
> 
> > example as a result of an index search?
> 
> That can be done in quite a simple way.. the easiest way is to modify the
> HTTP server so that it creates a temporary file, then calls up a routine 
> which handles the request and writes to that file, then sends and afterwards 

Even better you can just:

   fprintf(ns, "<TITLE>Search Results</TITLE>\n");
   fprintf(ns, "...\n");

In Plexus I do this all the time.  Calling it a "virtual document" is
really just a fancy way of saying you generate the data on the fly
instead of just returning a fixed file.  You can also pass existing
data through a filter (like the man page filter) or you can do anything
else you can think of (run a macro preprocessor like m4 over it etc).

--sanders