Well, today I managed to add another exciting feature to the library catalog. Now, thanks to a suggestion by Kendall we have a popup map showing the location of items in the library. That feature in and of itself isn’t a major marvel. It is a bit unique, as I don’t know of any librarys doing it. The real excitement came later tonight when I used PHP, LDAP, NDS, and a few DIV tags to add a dynamicly placed “you are here” beacon to the map. The page checcks the REMOTE_IP data provided by the webserver to see if the request is being made form a machien in the proper IP range. Once it determins that the requesting system is actually a library system, it queries NDS by way of LDAP to find teh workstation object. After acquiring the workstation object from NDS it retrieves the maping coordinates from the location property. The map coordinates are actually used by another program I wrote a while back to manage all my workstations. Unfortunatly for me the maps arent excatly the same size, I shrank the maps by a percentage. So of course the coordinates had to be multiplied by that percentage in order to get them to line up on the new maps. Once that was done everyitgn lined up just fine.
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John's Musings 