» FT eXchange - First Technical Preview
Even if it is not a full working FTX, it is still a small present for the
todays birthday.
Today, it is exactly one year ago, where I released the FTX, the Clan's own TrackBase. But it has never been really finished... So now I want to present you a first look into the new FTX:
The new FT eXchange!
Do not look only on the visible things, you won't see that much. An input field, some icons, and a box telling sth. about parameters. You will even not be able to find any tracks with this preview.
Important are the mechanics behind this frontend. I will try to help you seeing these mechanics
How the new FTX Browser works behind the scenes
Enter something into the input field and wait few moments. Do you see, how the inputted value has been written several times in the lower box? Okay, nothing special, until you know, what really happened.
The "Current Parameters" should update immediately while typing something (or clicking the Icons). These values are those, currently written in the browse box, and remembered for later use.
After a small delay, your input is copied to "Requested Parameters": This means, that the FTX has sent your input to the server, now waiting for an answer. (This delay is forced, to avoid many requests at once. Only if one second nothing changed, it really gets sent.)
Again, after another small delay, your input should get printed below "Responded Parameters". This is, where the script received the answer from the server, in future the results of your new search, which will get printed into your browser. (At the moment, the server is only returning the parameters, to show that the request is completed.) So a change of the "Responded Parameters" means, that the current shown Tracklist will have changed
So you changed an input... and only few seconds later these changes has been applied without any other activity. No pushing of a "Search" button anymore
A more detailled look onto the "Browse Tracks" box
The input field for the Track name should be self-explanatory: Enter a value, and wait.
Instead of having a DropDown box for the Environment and Difficulty, you now have some icons, allowing you to search for several Envis/Difficulties at once. Each icon is freely selectable and unselectable by a single click.
You want to search for Island-Only tracks? No problem: Simply double-click the Island-Icon, it will then be selected and all other Environments will get unselected

(There will be a hint in the final version, telling this to the user.)
(Btw: The number of the parameters "envi" and "diff" are a binary representation of which icons are
not selected. The reason is, that I wanted to have 0 representing "all Icons selected" as initial value. So a missing "envi" means "envi=0" means "all Envis selected"

)
Deep Linking even though the page is always the same
Also annoyed from the "External Link" on TMX? Or from the always same URL in the old FTX after searching?
Change again a value, and then directly look into the address bar. In that moment, where the paramters get written into "Requested Parameters", the URL changed. Click the Back button in your browser: You should now have your previous search, with your previous parameters.
Want to give a search query to a third person? Copy&Paste the address bar, as known from everywhere:
http://funtrackers.bplaced.net/newexchan...=universal.
@ kastun: Don't try it, you have no chance to hack the parameters by entering sth. like "dummy/foo=bar" into the name field
The only problems are caused by the %, it seems to be a bug in the used script for deep linking.
Time for Playing ^^
Now it's your turn: Play a bit with the parameters, and look, how the page reacts. Afterwards, feel free to give some feedback: How does this new method of "browsing" feel (even if no results are given)? Any questions to the FTX? Any bugs? Or any suggestions?
As last information: The browse-box is not complete yet, there will be a DropDown box for selecting the Author, and some icons for selecting the length of the tracks. But I think the first 3 parameters are already enough for testing it
FT»Marcel