Where are we going from here?

Secondly, we plan to upgrade our class to be compliant with the latest version of SiteSearch.

Finally, we're experimenting with a process whereby the database record structure is defined in some file outside of the formatting classes, perhaps in the database's ini file. This information could then be read into memory, possibly in the UserStateObject, where it can be accessed by the formatting class. The formatting class for each database would be very simple, reading the record structure into an array, which is passed to new class, which then does all the work of reading the array and calling each method in GenericMarcArticleFmt, using the data from the array. In an ideal implementation, the programmer would only have to enter the record structure once, into an ini file, then let the formatting classes do all the configuration work. It would not be necessary to write individual formatting classes except in rare situations.

Of course, this would be in an ideal implementation.

Note - Lisa Cox's talk at the Conference seemed to indicate that OCLC was moving in this direction for the next version of SiteSearch, therefore we may hold off on doing any more work on this until we see version 4.1.

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