Administrators Guide

Content Aggregator Engine

Background

The objective of this system is to provide a convenience way to transform existing web pages, into structured data. Then the data can be used to assembly pages in other formats.

In the case of Investment Bank (IB), this means to extract data from IB price and performance data pages, to form a data page.

Here is the more complete example: A walkthrough of creating the file for extracting the current prices of IB.

Step 1 : Define the data source

We call this data source as ‘IB_prices?(excluding quotes), as we will use this name later.

Step 2 : Find out what pages are needed.

Step 3 : Find out the data you want

Assuming the data needed is about the

0. Name of fund;

1. Currency;

2. Bid price;

3. Offer price;

Comparing with the original page

Further investigation of the same page reveals that there are some groupings of funds, as,

Enter our testing pattern here, and click ‘Try it!?button, another page appears as,

When returning to the main screen, you can click the link (Details) to check the values captured in the data source. A screen is similar to the following one:

output templates

Once you have configured your data source, you can start building pages by creating templates.

When a template is read, the system reads the data from the data source associated, and paste the data needed into the template, to form a complete document.

Here are the general steps for creating templates to suit your needs:

1. Identify your desired formats;

2. For each format,

   1. Design the overall layout;

   2. Create a template file for each output page;

3. Configure the system;

4. Testing.

Currently the system is limited that the generated content must reside on the same server, it do not perform any ftp or file copy?function to transfer the finished content to other servers. A workaround for this limitation is to use NFS or Windows sharing (via SAMBA package under Linux/Unix platform), to export/share the directory, so that other servers can read, or even copy the contents to their desired locations.

The following sections are intended to guide administrators to create the desired content format.

We assume that the reader is having basic skills of creating content in the desired format, like general HTML for World-Wide-Web. If you wish to create content for mobile users, like AvantGo!, Palms PQA, WWW browsers on Palm/Windows CE/EPOC 32 Platform, WAP, i-mode, or anything else, be sure to read relevant documentation about creating content for these formats.

In the following example, we use the prices of IB Funds as to illustrate the processes.

Identify your desired formats

offer two formats, AvantGo! And Palms PQA, hence we have two formats to work with.

From our report of the visitors on the site, our valuable customers can get the number and
the type of daily visitors to the web site. This useful informations can enhance the analysis
of the customer behaviour in future.