Web Copy User Manual

 Ruigang Yang
Department of Computer Science
Columbia Univeristy

Table of Content

1. Overview
2. How to use WCP
   • How to install
   • How to run
   • How to use the GUI
3. Known bugs
4. Support
5. Credits

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1. Overview:

Web Copy(WCP) is a Java application, it starts from a single URL pointing to a compound document (i.e. a set of html files which conceptually form a complete document), and copies the compound document to a local disk until certain criteria has been met, (recursive depth, keyword match etc.)

It features:

• Platform independent
• Can be used in both command line (batch) or interactive modes
• User can select which HTML file to download (in the interactive mode)
• Modify the HTML files if necessary to keep the integrity of anchors
• Configurable download options, (By depth, By keyword or Manual Check)
• Multiple Saving options: Local Disk, email to a group of person or a server.
• Sync Display HTML page in browser
• Show statistics after downloading

2. How to use WCP

2.1 How to install WCP

In order to use WCP you need to have Java installed in your system. Follow these instructions to install WCP.

1. Create a directory where you want to store the binaries of WCP
2. Unzip WCP.zip into that directory, it will create 2 subdirectory, wcp and netcom
3. Make sure java is in your path.
4. Make sure CLASSPATH variable exists, and contains current directory '.' as well and the netcom directory. This variable at least should contain these values (CLASSPATH=.../java/lib/classes.zip;.)

2.2 How to run WCP

WCP can run as a standalone application, at the prompt, type
java MainFrame.

2.3 Using Graphical User Interface (GUI)

Using the package in interactive mode is quite straight forward.  A quick start is to fill the URL you want to fetch, and the destination directory, then click Go to start the download process

Here is a brief description of program menu and buttons .

File menu contains following items:   

Exit	Exit the program

Edit Menu:

Cut	clear the selected text, and copy to the clip broad
Copy	copy the selected text to the clip broad
Paste	copy text from the clipboard

Help Menu:

Help	start Netscape to display this help page
About	show some information about the software

Main Screen

• From:
  the source URL
• Depth Limit:
  the maxim recursive length, default value 1 means only the page specified in 1 will be copied.
• Key word: if filled in, only pages containing the keyword will be saved. (Image will always be saved)
• Manual Check:
  If checked, the previous 2 items will be disabled , a window listing all the links in side the current page will be displayed.
• Save To:
  save a file to a local disk
• Email To:
  email the compressed (zipped file) to the email address(es). (temp file will be saved in /tmp or c:\temp depending on the platform)
• Upload To:
  upload the compressed (zipped file) to the ftp server. (temp file will be saved in /tmp or c:\temp depending on the platform)
• Go:
  start the download process
• Exit:
  quit the program
• Help:
  show this help page in a web browser.

Manual Check Window

The above window will pop up if the "manual check " box is checked in the main window.
It contains a TreeView components which lists the structure of the anchors in the page. The leading tiny icon indicates the attribute of the link, (HTML , images, etc). User can double click any link to download it. After downloading, the icon associated with that page will be highlighted. Check the Sync Display to display the clicked page in a web browser. (works best under Unix Version of Netscape 3.0 and above)

Important: Once you finished selecting the desired page, click Done to save them. If you click Cancel, NO page will be saved to the local disk

3. Limitations and known bugs

1. Icons in the Manual Check window some time will disappear, click on the link will bring it back.
2. Double click on the check box will distort the enable/disable state of the text field below it.
3. Sync Display in the Manual Check window will function only under Unix platform. (Netscape for Win95 or NT doesn’t support remote call directly)
4. Only links in the same website as the starting URL will be saved, any links to the out side links will be considered as an external link and will not be saved under any circumstance.
5. Java Class will not be downloaded.
   

4. Support

Are you kidding? But any way, you can always send me bug report to ryang@cs.columbia.edu. I will try to fix and make future improvement.

5. Credits

WCP uses ORO, Inc. 's Java package NetComponents to implement Email and FTP distribution of copied documents. UUencoder class used for email transfer is developed by
Matthew Phillip Hixson.