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Technical Information


The heart of this system is a Microsoft Access 2.0 database and an exporter program that creates virtually all the HTML files, including the main artist information and the alphabetical and category indices. This makes updating the data very easy, since I can do it all within Access and don't have to edit the HTML source directly. Generation of all the HTML files currently takes about five minutes.

I recently discovered that it's a relatively simple matter to have the exporter program generate RTF instead of HTML, which means that the entire database could be made available as a Windows Help file. That way it could be browsed on machines that don't have a proper Web browser or Internet connection. It turns out that Windows Help, for all its faults, has pretty much the same kind of hypertext features that the music database needs. Check back here later for my progress on that project.

If you know something about Access or relational databases in general, this diagram will show you more about how the various tables are linked together. Not all the fields you see here are used at the moment.