PAD Files

Introduction

This project offers a way so users can create PAD Files on their Drupal site without having to know anything about the XML format or have to use some "weird external tools".

The module lets users enter all the necessary data, validate the data properly, and serve the PAD files as required.

You can have a look at the output on the Turn Watcher website. Look at the bottom of the page (right after the scroll). Click on the white links to see the XML file and the PAD Page. Those are the result of entering the necessary data in the PAD File as created by this module.

How it works

Extract the package in your sites/all/modules or some other modules folder.

Select the modules you want to use under admin/build/modules

• PAD File; main module used to create the files and serve them
• PAD File Input Filter; insert links in your nodes with [padfile <language> <name> <field>]
• PAD File Page; enable padpage/<name> to visualize the PAD file as a node
• PAD File View; gives you access to all the PAD file data in your views*

*At this time the views do not support multi-language descriptions. They only show the English version. More soonish. (Jan 19, 2008)

PAD Files creation

Go to admin/content/padfile to create your PAD files. You can then either click on the Add PAD File and enter all the information or, if you already have a file, you can click on Import PAD File

Notice that you can deactivate a PAD file. In that case, you can still edit it, but it is hidden (i.e. will not be served.)

PAD Files served

Once you created a PAD file, you can find them under padfile/<language>/<padfile name>.xml

You can also get a list of all your active PAD files at padfile/list.xml (which is not part of the specification but feels sensible unless you have an enormous site, in which case we'll have to think about breaking that list in chunks of something like 50,000 entries each with list.xml being the first chunk, then list2.xml, etc.)

Note that there is a special field for you to define the PAD File name. It can be different from the product name. It is actually suggested that you do not use spaces and other special characters in this name. This name is saved in the XML file as the name to be used to access the file later.

The language is one of the languages supported by the PAD format or 'all' for all the languages available for that PAD file. That is, pretty much all the languages spoken on Earth today. It is possible to use the abbreviation of the language name (i.e. 'en' instead of 'English').

Note: the reason why you can select a language or another is because some totally broken systems only accept English (weird if you ask me.)

Exporting your PAD Files

From the administration form, you can click on Export. Notice that there is an Export in the top list that will include all the languages and one in the descriptions list that only exports the selected language.

The path to export a PAD file is padfile/export/<language>/<padfile name>.xml

The language can be omitted or set to 'all'.

Filter

Edit your nodes to use the input filter. The tag starts with [padfile:. You can then specify the name of the language and the name of the PAD file. Close the tag with ]. The language is optional, the current language will be used or English if undefined. The language can be abbreviated (i.e. 'en' instead of 'English').

PAD File Specification

The PAD File specifications can be found at this place:

http://www.asp-shareware.org/pad/

Requirements

• PHP DOMDocument object
• Views (only to use the PAD File Views module)

TODO

• Adding a way to upload the file(s) from within the PAD File forms and use that to fill in the size, links, etc.
  • In that regard, there is a bug in the PAD File format: if you have 1 file per operating system, then you have to create one PAD File per file since you have only ONE primary link at the bottom. Maybe it was supposed to be like that, in any event, the link definition is surely broken in that respect.
• Different enhanced verification processes for (really) dumb servers
• Adding the signature
• Adding lots of help to all the forms
• Change the different static arrays to make use of the Taxonomy (i.e. category, install support, etc.)

Releases

Official releases	Date	Size	Links	Status
6.x-1.2	2009-Jul-16	40.88 KB	Download · Release notes	Recommended for 6.x

Development snapshots	Date	Size	Links	Status
6.x-1.x-dev	2009-Jul-14	40.9 KB	Download · Release notes	Development snapshot