CGI Program: Unify Course Retrieval Scripts

Introduction

Unify is a tool in support of academic administration permitting schools and academic departments the ability to manage:

• the revision of course information
• the publication of print & online course listings
• the versioned sharing of documents
• the recommendation of students for honors
• the publication of advising information

In support of the publication of print & online course listings, Unify provides two http-based course retrieval interfaces (webAPIs) via which course information may be requested and presented.

By forming a request to either of Unify's course retrieval interfaces, one may specify what courses to return and how to present these courses. Requests consist of name/value pairings of the form:

name=value

The pairings are separated by ampersands, &. Variable names are case-sensitive.

The report script

The first interface, report, permits the display of a department's course listings and class sectioning information as presented by a given school's bulletin.

At a minimum, the report interface requires that one specify a school and department as per the documentation at the following URL:

http://www.college.columbia.edu/unify/docs/

A sample of the report script's output would be as follows:

http://www.columbia.edu/cgi-bin/unify/reports?school=EN&deptVar=COMS

Such a search would return the Computer Science Department's (COMS) courses as offered in the bulletin of The School of Engineering and Applied Science (EN).

The bulletinSearch script

The second interface, bulletinSearch, permits searches or the filtering of course listings and class sectioning information across departments.

At a minimum, the bulletinSearch interface requires that one specify a school as per the documentation at the following URL:

http://www.college.columbia.edu/unify/docs/

A sample of bulletinSearch would be as follows:

http://www.columbia.edu/cgi-bin/unify/bulletinSearch?school=CC&subjectVar=CPLT

Such a search would return all courses belonging to subject area Comparative Literature (CPLT) offered to Columbia College (CC) students.

How To Use Unify's Course Retrieval Interfaces in Columbia University Hosted Web Sites

On Columbia's web servers, one calls upon either the report or bulletinSearch cgi-scripts installed at the following URLs, respectively:

http://www.columbia.edu/cgi-bin/unify/report
http://www.columbia.edu/cgi-bin/unify/bulletinSearch

These cgi-scripts forward one's request to Unify. The cgi-scripts may be used to 1) embed course information within a web page or 2) generate standalone web pages.

How to Embed Course Information Within Web Pages

Simply do a server side include (SSI) within your page. To do so, insert a line similar to the following within an html file.

<!--#include virtual="/cgi-bin/unify/bulletinSearch?school=CC&subjectVar=CPLT"-->

Documentation on the use of server-side includes on Columbia's web servers can be found at the following URL:

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/webdev/ssi/index.html

How to Generate Standalone Web Pages

Using a form, one may submit retrieval interface variables to one of the cgi-scripts via a GET or POST mechanism to obtain Unify generated course information.

Further Info

For more information about Unify please visit the following URL:

https://www.college.columbia.edu/unify/