Jaffis Documentation - Part 2

Index : What is Jaffis? · First Things First · Doing a Fanfiction.Net Search · Fanfiction.Net Updates · Global Filters · Skeletons · Downloading Fanfics and Updating Them · Fimfiction.Net · An Archive of Our Own

## Global Filters

Filters were introduced in a previous section. Those filters were intended to be part of a single search, to be used to allow complicated filtering for a single task. However, there is a lot of utility in having Filters that can be reused for different searches, and that is what Global Filters are for. Global Filters can be references by embedding `@<Filter Group Name>;<Filter Name>@` into an expression.

The individual Global Filters are stored in groups, which I've called Maps for some reason I no longer remember. Note That there must be at least one map in the Global Filters.

## Skeletons

This certainly looks rather complicated, and to a certain extent, it is. Basically, when producing HTML result reports and downloading fics, rather than hard coding how it is done, we use the skeletons. These are fragments of raw HTML from which we assemble the result. The program uses custom notation (the `<<#...#>>` and similar things as you can see from the image) to insert data. The Skeletons come with descriptions that should be enough to allow you to understand what goes on. This can be used to control what an HTML result file looks like, what sort of style it uses, and so on.

## Downloading Fanfics and Updating Them

There are 2 ways to use Jaffis to download a fanfic, both of them similar.

The first is that if you right-click on a result of a search (from the results display), one can then pick Download the Fic... to get a downloader dialog. From the dialog, you can pic a directory to download to (either directly, or the default download directory or a sub directory thereof). You can also edit the result filename.

The second is by using the option from the tools menu: in the dialog that pops up, one can enter the Url of the fic to download, and also the filename. Here, one can download Mediaminer.org and HarryPotterFanfiction.com fics as well as Fanfiction.Net,Fimfiction.Net, and Archive of our own stories. If you use the standard urls for Fanfiction.Net and Fimfiction.Net, you can get a quick filename by clicking on the small button labelled 'c'.

In addition to downloading, there is also a special interface for updating downloaded fanfics. This comes as a tab (as seen below) rather than a modal dialog, so can update fics while doing other searches. First, you pic the directory where the fics you want checked are. After pressing start, the program gets a list of every single file ending in .html, including the ones in all subdirectories, and checks them one by one to see if they are downloaded fics files, extracting the data they contain. Once the program has a complete list of fanfics (including those spread across multiple files), it fetches the first page or index page of each of those fanfics, optionally skipping over stories marked as complete, and if the stories have been updated, re-downloads them to the same directory where they were read from.

Index : What is Jaffis? · First Things First · Doing a Fanfiction.Net Search · Fanfiction.Net Updates · Global Filters · Skeletons · Downloading Fanfics and Updating Them · Fimfiction.Net · An Archive of Our Own