Caucus How-To:
Uploading Files
(Revised 26 August 1998) |
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I. The Good News
It's easy to upload a single file, of any type, into a Caucus item or response. (If you're an organizer, you can also upload a file into a conference greeting or introduction.) You can also upload many files into a single item or response. But you can only do this one file at a time. (For security reasons, the people who designed the HTML file upload feature restricted it to a single file at a time.) |
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When you're adding a response to an item (or editing a response),
look for the
button, near the upper right corner of the response box.
Press this button (even in the middle of entering or editing your response), and you will see a new page that does the actual file uploading. When you're done with this page, you'll be returned to your response, and you can keep entering or editing text as you see fit (or even upload another file).
When you're done entering your response, press one of the Post buttons, and your text and your uploaded files will be posted as your response.
II. For more help
When you see the "upload" page (i.e., after you've pressed the upload button), press the Help button at the very top of the page. This will cause a "pop-up" help window to appear. Click on the very first link in this window to learn more about using the upload page.
III. The Bad News
Just because you can upload a file doesn't mean that people will see what you wanted them to see!
For example, if you upload a Microsoft Word document into your response and check the "plain text" or "HTML" radio button, your response will be filled with gobbledygook.
When dealing with files on the web (whether through Caucus or some other means), you must be careful about matching the type of file to how the user sees that file. You don't want, for example, to try and display an image as text, nor would you want to display a Word document as an image! Caucus tries to make that as easy as possible -- that's why the radio buttons "plain text", "HTML", "image", etc. appear on the upload page.
The next section describes what each of the radio buttons mean, and what files to use them with. It also goes the other way: given a particular file type, it tells you the best approach(es) to uploading that file.
IV. File Types and the Upload Radio Butons
The upload page supplies 5 radio buttons that tell Caucus how to treat the uploaded file:
You can also create "plain text" files with Microsoft Word (and other applications), but you must use "Save As Text" or "Save as Text (with line breaks)", and then upload that file. (In Word, chose "Save As", and then "text" from the list of possibilities.)
If you do upload an entire HTML page, note that everything between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags is ignored by Caucus -- since the response is already inside the <BODY> part of an HTML page, any <HEAD> or <TITLE> tags are irrelevant. Usually this will not matter, unless you've put some JavaScript between those tags.
Remember that HTML pages are a form of plain text! If you write up an HTML page in, say, Microsoft Word", you must use "Save As Text" to save the file.
The other way of looking at file uploading is to start with the particular type of file, and decide what you want Caucus to do with it.
BUT... there's a problem with this. If you create your document, say, in Word 7 on a Macintosh, and someone is trying to read it in Word 6 on a PC... they may still see gobbledygook.
RTF files are plain text files that contain special tags (like HTML but more precise) that preserve all of your formatting information. Any word processor can read and interpret an RTF file written by any other word processor on any other platform.
So, coming back to Caucus, if you have a large Word document that you want everyone in a conference to be able to read, your best bet is to "save as" RTF, and upload the RTF file as a named link. The other people in the conference can click on the link, and read it with their local word processor (which will often be started up automatically by the browser).
More and more applications have some sort of "Save as HTML" option that also allows you to save the data as an HTML page, which lets you post the HTML instead. Which choice makes the most sense depends on how you expect people to use the data -- if they're just going to view it, HTML is fine. If they have to edit it or work with it, you're probably better off keeping the data in its original form.
This is very much like the <IMG> tag, which browsers have always used to "embed" an image in the middle of HTML text. Except in this case, unlike images, the browser must typically have a "plug-in" that provides the special functionality to display the file.
Caucus does not directly support EMBED'able files in responses. (You can, however, do it yourself by writing your own HTML response, of course.) This technology is still new and doesn't work very well; as the browser support for EMBED improves, we expect to add a "Embed" radio button to the list of file types on the upload page.
V. Macro ("%") codes for uploaded files
You will notice that when you upload a file into a response (as an image or as a link), that some text beginning with "%" is added to your response.
These "%" codes are Caucus "macros". The macros are automatically expanded, when the response is displayed, into the appropriate HTML codes to produce the <IMG> tag or <A HREF> tags needed to show the image or link. The macros provide a compact and flexible way of representing your uploaded file, without forcing the entire response to be treated as HTML.
For more information, see the FAQ entry on Caucus Macros.
VI. Problems
Once you've successfully uploaded files into Caucus, there may still be circumstances in which a problem occurs when downloading that file.
In particular, if you encounter problems downloading binary files (word documents, spreadsheets, power-point files, etc.), it may be necessary to make some changes to your web server software configuration. This an issue for many web servers, it is not unique to Caucus. Show this section to the administrator of your system (or whoever manages the web server).
Possible problems include:
In many cases it is necessary to tell the web server how to download certain kinds of files. For example, it may be necessary to tell the web server that a ".ppt" file is a PowerPoint file, and should be treated appropriately.
For many web servers, such as Apache, there is a file called mime.types that holds a list of associations between file extension and how it should be treated. We recommend, in case of problems, that the system administrator add the following lines to that file:
application/PowerPoint ppt PPT application/msword doc DOC application/msexcel xls XLS application/octet-stream Z bin zip exe mdb gz BIN ZIP EXE MDB GZ
The first three lines handle specific types of files; the last line says that files ending in .Z, .bin, zip, .exe, etc. must always be treated as pure binary files.