More on the Navigator

Thanks to David Burden for rapid feedback on the failure of my cunning plan to use the client web browser to fill in form fields when searching bibliographic databases using the new Daden Navigator. The thinking was that you can compose and carry out the search in the client browser and set the parcel media URL via the browser button so that everyone can see the results using Navigator. It transpires that (for good reasons) Navigator does not actually read the URL from the parcel media so cannot determine the next link based on its value.

Plan B is to use an intermediary prim to compose the search, i.e. the prim listens for avatar search terms and then composes and chats the rather complex URL to the Navigator. This seems to work for MedLine at the EBI and, indeed, obviates the need to visit the search page at all. This may not, of course, be entirely a good thing (we are driven to using a particular search engine simply for SL compatibility and the formulation of search queries is still opaque) though it is arguably not much worse than carrying out the search in the unshared client browser. Either way, we are not quite done here yet.

A couple of ideas I want to explore: use of MobWrite (which can handle shared forms as well as text), and use of prims to represent search terms on a mat laid out as per the query form (though this sounds a bit clunky).

All this fits in rather nicely with the unexpected visit we had from Sheila Yoshikawa yesterday. We were in warm down mode following a Prim 101 training session given by Eloise Pasteur (pondering our blogs and elective project) so the place was, unfortunately, a little untidy. We were, however able to give Sheila a quick demo of the Navigator.