FLUDViz: Operation

FLUD Visualization Tool | Download | Installation | Operation | Results

Environment
Setup

FLUDViz needs two pieces of environmental information to run successfully.

1. Character Geometry

FLUDViz uses the character geometry file in the resources directory to draw labels. By default, FLUDViz will look for the char-geom.dat file in its current directory, since the generic resources are not necessarily tied to Web Metrics applications.

In a Windows environment, the location of the character geometry file is passed via the registry variable HKEY\Software\NIST\WebMetrics\CHAR_GEOM.

Unix-type systems can be told where to look via the CHAR_GEOM environmental variable with a statement such as:

   setenv CHAR_GEOM /home/myspot/char-geom.dat

Note that if you place the generic resources within the WebMetrics tree as recommended in the standard directory structure, the character geometry file will reside in the $WEBMET_TOOLS/resources/ogl directory.

2. Browser

FLUDViz displays some of its information via your local browser. On Windows systems, this is done automatically.

For Unix-type systems, it will try to figure out what browser you are using, but if it cannot, you can tell it via the BROWSER environmental variable. The full use of this variable is somewhat complex, and is explained here. In the simple case, BROWSER should be set to a command string that will display an URL, using "%s" substitution, e.g.

   setenv BROWSER "netscape -raise -remote \"openURL(%s,new-window)\""

tells FLUDViz to display the page "mystuff.html" using the command:

   netscape -raise -remote "openURL(mystuff.html,new-window)"

Input Data

As its name implies, FLUDViz visualizes the contents of a single FLUD file (see FLUD Overview). It uses the parsed (filename.parse) and pretty-print (filename.html) form of the file; therefore, the FLUD parser must be used to generate these formats from the raw format (filename.ulog) generated by WebVIP. Take a look at the Web Metrics dataflow diagram to get a sense of how FLUDViz fits within the Web Metrics tool set.

FLUDViz must be told which subtree contains the log data. In Unix environments, the environment variable WEBLOG_DATA must be set for this purpose, e.g.

   setenv WEBLOG_DATA /home/whoever/WebMetrics/WebLogs

In a Windows environment, the information is passed via the registry variable HKLM\Software\NIST\WebMetrics\WEBLOG_DATA.

Since the WEBLOG_DATA directory may contain information on several websites, the website of interest must be specified as "w=website" when FLUDViz is invoked, e.g.

   fludviz w=my-website

Given the examples above, FLUDViz would look for input files named:

   $WEBLOG_DATA/my-website/sessions/*.parse
      and
   $WEBLOG_DATA/my-website/sessions/*.html

Features

For detailed instructions on all the individual features of FLUDViz, start it up and then click on the various yellow help boxes in the menu window. The help system also contains documentation on all the parameters that can be used at invocation.

Overview | Installation | Operation | Results | FAQ

Version 1.0
Page last modified: 15 May 2002
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)