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<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"><title>Chapter 3. Administration</title><link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" type="text/css"><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.48"><link rel="home" href="index.html" title="MediaIndexer Document Management System"><link rel="up" href="index.html" title="MediaIndexer Document Management System"><link rel="previous" href="ch02s02.html" title="Configuration"><link rel="next" href="ch03s02.html" title="Maintaining Metadata"></head><body text="black" link="#0000FF" vlink="#840084" alink="#0000FF"><div class="navheader"><table width="100%" summary="Navigation header"><tr><th colspan="3" align="center">Chapter 3. Administration</th></tr><tr><td width="20%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="ch02s02.html">Prev</a> </td><th width="60%" align="center"> </th><td width="20%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="ch03s02.html">Next</a></td></tr></table><hr></div><div class="chapter"><div class="titlepage"><div><h2 class="title"><a name="id2770496"></a>Chapter 3. Administration</h2></div></div><div class="toc"><p><b>Table of Contents</b></p><dl><dt><a href="ch03.html#id2770552">Metadata Storage</a></dt><dt><a href="ch03s02.html">Maintaining Metadata</a></dt></dl></div><p>MediaIndexer works by storing metadata about the files in your repository in a SQLite database.
Files are indexed by their md5 checksum, which allows them to be moved around within your repostory
without having to update the database. The actual path to the file is not known by the database.
The database only holds data such as a title, a description, user comments, number of accesses to the
file, and it's mirroring URLs.</p><p>You may supply static content for each directory by placing specific files in their respective
directories. This is to remain semi-compatible with Apache's Fancy Indexing feature. For example,
the files <tt>HEADER.html</tt>, <tt>README.html</tt>, <tt>FOOTER.html</tt>
are treated as a special files to MediaIndexer. If any of these files are found, they are printed as
content for that page. This allows you to build an entire website with content around your file
system.</p><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id2770552"></a>Metadata Storage</h2></div></div><p>Information about your files and directories is known as metadata. MediaIndexer
uses a SQLite database for storing these properties. Since SQLite is bundled into
PHP5, this makes it possible to not require any installation or configuration.
When MediaIndexer is first run, it checks for the necessary database files and tables,
and creates them automatically if they do not already exist.</p><p>The metadata stored in the database is completely maintained on-the-fly, and is transparent to
your structure of your files. To identify files, it reads the first 1024 bytes of each of your files
and creates a md5 checksum of this string. This <span class="emphasis"><i>hash</i></span> is used as a unique key
for identifying metadata in the database. This method allows you to move around your file structure
as you like without having to keep the database synchronized. (this is new as of 0.7)</p><p>In short, administrative maintenance is not necessary. There are no cron scripts to run, etc.</p></div></div><div class="navfooter"><hr><table width="100%" summary="Navigation footer"><tr><td width="40%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="ch02s02.html">Prev</a> </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="u" href="index.html">Up</a></td><td width="40%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="ch03s02.html">Next</a></td></tr><tr><td width="40%" align="left" valign="top">Configuration </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="h" href="index.html">Home</a></td><td width="40%" align="right" valign="top"> Maintaining Metadata</td></tr></table></div></body></html>