Question

When using e.g. DatabasePlugin or having lots of pages with aggregated information (i.e. uses ), sometimes it would be a nice feature, if it was possible to see what the search or other dynamic content provider produced at an earlier time.

But I haven't seen this kind of feature in any plugin or addon yet - or am I just not opening my eyes?

Automated, scheduled or just implemented as "Snapshot this page now"-button style - all would work mighty fine.

Hints appreciated!

Environment

-- SteffenPoulsen - 15 Mar 2005

Answer

You could use the PublishAddOn to do static snapshots of the topics/webs you are interested in.

-- FranzJosefSilli - 15 Mar 2005

I'll add another line to the requirement part

I'm thinking towards a concept where a topic can have a number of snapshots. One idea is to simply have a <TOPICNAME>Snapshots topic generated first time <TOPICNAME> has a snapshot taken.

Next snapshots would simply replace the contents of the snapshots page, automatically pushing earlier snapshots into revision history for the topic.

PublishAddOn is for a point-in-time static snapshot only - that's not what I was after, sorry for the vagueness

-- SteffenPoulsen - 15 Mar 2005

This sounds like a new SnapShotPlugin. This Plugin would add a [Take snapshot] button when it sees a %SNAPSHOT% variable. Clicking on it would trigger the snapshot action.

You could leverage some code from the VarCachePlugin that evaluates and caches all %VARIABLES% (but not TWikiML to HTML). The cache result wold be the text to store in the snapshot topic.

Do not introduce a new script, better to handle all in a the Plugin, similar to how the EditTablePlugin works.

Example text:

%SNAPSHOT{ snapshotaction="%URLPARAM{snapshotaction}%" }%

If action parameter is not set, the Plugin expands that to:

<form name="snapshot" action="%SCRIPTURL%/viewauth%SCRIPTSUFFIX%/%WEB%/%TOPIC%">
<input type="hidden" name="snapshotaction" value="take" />
<input type="submit" name="formaction" id="take" value="Take snapshot" />
</form>

The viewauth script makes sure the user is authenticated, which is needed for the snapshot save action. Submitting the form will result in this text:

%SNAPSHOT{ snapshotaction="take" }%

The snapshotaction="take" will trigger a snapshot and save action.

-- PeterThoeny - 19 Mar 2005