BOL Tricks

In order to enable easier checking of Benchmarks Online against the print (aka 1993) version, I implemented a switch that allows you to specify the 1993 version as the default tab displayed. To enable to switch you have to visit the utility with the querystring bmtabver=1993 appended. So the following URL would enable the switch:

http://www.project2061.org/bol?bmtabver=1993

To disable the switch change the value from 1993 to 2007 (or delete the “bmtabver” cookie from your browser).

This switch is not publicly noted on the site (though visitors to this entry would obviously know of its existence).

Atlas/Benchmarks Databases

The data for Benchmarks Online (BOL) is pulled from various tables in the Items database. Some of these tables are also used for the Atlas Statements Database (ASD). Since staff would like for the statements in the ASD to reflect the most recent working version we needed a way to prevent this from affecting BOL, which needs to maintain a stable set of publicly available statements. As a temporary resolution the tables that are used to populate BOL have been copied into a new database called Standards. Going forward, if the content of these tables is updated and those updates need to also be reflected in BOL both copies of each table should be updated.

A long-term goal is to develop a system to contain information related to our standards documents (namely Benchmarks and Atlas). This new system should implement some kind of versioning capability so that we can maintain stable and working copies of the benchmarks statements. This would also allow us to keep better track of how resources are aligned to statements. Currently as a statement is modified we have no way of knowing the wording to which a resource has been aligned.