Instructions to link to the scaledirectory.co.uk database

Overview

How it works

  1. Either copy files from existing pages or create files to define header, footer and side panels that match your site. Name these head.htm, top.htm, foot.htm, and side.htm and send by e-mail. You can also create a stylesheet to define formats for the output pages. Name this pagestyle.css and again send by e-mail.
  2. Insert a link in your main website that links to the database - this will return product information formatted so it looks likes the rest of your site.
  3. Include links in the header, footer and/or side panel back to your other web pages.

Pages available from the database

Section listing lists products by catalogue section
Category listing lists products by product type
Section page product specifications for a specified catalogue section
Category page product specifications for a specified category
Listing by division all scales listed by division
Listing by capacity all scales listed by capacity
The listings contain links to the relevant product specification pages or if preferred, you can create links directly to these specification pages.

Technical information

To link to the database, the URL required is in the following format:
    http://www.scaledirectory.co.uk/products.asp?arg1=val1&arg2=val2&arg3=val3
where arg1, arg2, etc. and val1, val2, etc. are the argument-value pairs to identify the originating website and the pages to return.

Possible arguments and values are as follows:
Arguments Possible values Comments
id A valid & registered customer reference no. Must be submitted in the first call of the session - ignored thereafter
pagetype seclist
catlist
spec
divlist
caplist 		Specifies the type of page to return
section A valid catalogue section number Specifies the section number for catalogue section pages
category A valid category number Specifies the category number for category specification pages

Additional arguments

Additional arguments have been defined to suppress the display of prices and to add a unique product ID code for each product.

Included file formats

The file "head.htm" includes all page header information up to and including the opening <body> tag. The purpose of this file is to enable scripts, preloaded files, header information and body attributes to be set to match the originating web site.

The files "top.htm", "foot.htm", and "side.htm" are basic html files that are included within the page returned by products.asp. These files should not have any html, head, or body tags, as these are set elsewhere. The pages are inserted into three separate table sections as follows:

head.htm


top.htm
side.htm    

main content

 

foot.htm

The blank column between the side panel and the main content is a spacer set at 20 pixels wide. The included files can incorporate graphics and links back to your originating site but note that these links and any reference to graphics files must use the full URL (http://www....).

Style sheet definitions

You can define any styles for use in the header, footer and side panels. Other classes are used in the specification pages that can be formatted in the "pagestyle.css" file. See the source code of the output html pages to see which classes are available.

Queries

If you have any queries, please contact the database administrator:

mailto:administrator@scaledirectory.co.uk