[albatross-users] Status on Albatross

[Tim Churches]

Andrew McNamara wrote:

>We hope to be able to do a new release next week. 
>
>As a teaser, here's the part of the release notice that deals with changes:
>
>  
>
------8<----snip-----8<------

>* New "ellipsis" mode for tree iterator, which are a variant of lazy trees
>  where nodes at shallower levels are progressively collapsed into
>  ellipses as the user opens deeper nodes. The user can reopen the
>  collapsed nodes by selecting an ellipsis
>
>* TreeIterators now support get_open_aliases(),
>  get_selected_aliases(), set_open_aliases(), set_selected_aliases()
>  methods to set and get open and selected nodes for the
>  TreeIterator. This allows you to enter a page with tree nodes already
>  open or selected, and also to save the state of the tree for future use.
>  
>
I can confirm that these new features work very well (they were 
developed for an Albatross-based project I am managing,
and have now been rolled back into the main Albatross distribution - 
something we are pleased to see happen).

Specifically, users can now navigate their way through the entire 
International Classification of Diseases (ICD) Versions 8, 9 and 10
code lists (i.e. hierarchical alphanumeric codes plus associated text 
descriptions, typically 40 to 100 bytes long). There are about 4000, 
6000 and
8000 distinct codes respectively in these code sets, and the Albatross 
"ellipsis" lazy trees allow the user to find their way through them using
minimal browser screen real estate (constant up-and-down scrolling is 
unnecessary), and no client-side scripting (hooray!) and the
performance is great (served from a very ordinary 866 MHz Pentium III 
box running Linux).

The only thing preventing Object Craft from putting up a demo of these 
lazy ellipsis trees is the copyright status of the ICD codesets, which are
published by WHO. The latest set is copyright, but we think that ICD-8 
and ICD-9 are not (no answer yet from Geneva on that, guys), so they
 may be able to host an example using those, or some other (preferrably 
large) tree of codes or desriptions from some other problem domain.

Tim C