Re: [Wikitech-l] Transferring parameters between pages

On Apr 5, 2005 3:51 PM, suresh.k.kadirvel(a)gsk.com &lt;suresh.k.kadirvel(a)gsk.com&gt; wrote: First, a quick semi-pedantic note: "Wikipedia" is not a generic noun, it is trademark referring to a unique project; what you are setting up is "a wiki". See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Names (and, possibly become even more confused). That aside... If there are a fairly small number of possibilities for the parameter, and not too many pages that need to use it either, you could just create a whole set of pages, exhaustively covering all options, and including a template with the correct parameter. e.g.: [[Foo/a]] contains {{content of foo|a}} [[Foo/b]] contains {{content of foo|b}} [[Bar/a]] contains {{content of bar|a}} etc. Still a lot of work to create them all, obviously, so probably not helpful. There's nothing really resembling that in MediaWiki, that I can think of. In general web terms, the obvious solution would be to tack parameters onto the URL, like "&param1=foo&param2=bar". The only kind of page that can have magic parameters like that in MediaWiki are "Special pages" - things like [[Special:Search]], [[Special:Contributions]], [[Special:Recentchanges]], etc, which are actually each a separate PHP class (dig through the code for how to create one). These are really designed to be for completely dynamic content, but depending what it is exactly you're trying to achieve, you might be able to use one to stuff variables into an otherwise static piece of content. Thinking about it, you could even create a special page which took as an argument the "template" page to stuff - as in ...title=Special:Stuffvariables&target=Page_with_variables_on&var1=foo&var2=bar. One key trick is that links to special pages can be made with internal syntax in the style [[Special:<pagename>/<param>]]; they don't, however, get any kind of existence check, so you'd get blue links even if you misspelled the target page's name. Another approach that occurred to me is to look at where the user has just been - either through the somewhat unreliable "referer" [sic] information, or using some kind of cookie-based tracking system - and then work out what the appropriate params would have been (might be doable if all you needed was the title of the last page visited, say, or something easily retrievable based on that). In terms of implementing something like that, it might be worth checking out the "bread crumbs" extension somebody's implemented at http://public.kitware.com/Wiki/User:Barre/Extensions/kw_bread_crumbs. A word of warning with that approach though - beware MediaWiki's internal parser caching! I hope these somewhat rambling thoughts are of some use - obviously, it all depends what the exact effect you're trying to create is, and how much coding you are prepared to do to make it happen... -- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]