1. Introduction
WWWISIS is a system developed and distributed by BIREME/PAHO/WHO, specially designed to act as a server for CDS/ ISIS databases in a WWW client/ server environment. It provides functions for searching and data entry operations over ISIS databases.
WWWISIS operates as a server through the WWW Common Gateway Interface (CGI). The actual operation is driven by parameters. Examples of parameters are: the input database name, a Boolean search and an output format specification. A key feature of WWWISIS is its capability to dynamically generate its execution parameters, based on data sent to the CGI process from the WWW.
WWWISIS may be called directly or through a command line inside a CGI script. A CGI script may contain one or more calls to WWWISIS. In addition, it may recall itself several times.
ISIS searching, formatting and field updating languages are available in WWWISIS. Search specifications can be gathered through WWW-forms, passed via CGI to WWWISIS and the results formatted and delivered to the client. Similarly, it is possible to implement database-updating operations. By default WWWISIS presupposes a multi-user environment.
WWWISIS output to the WWW browser is generated via ISIS formatting language. Taking into account the possibility to include HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language) codes in format specifications, using conditional and unconditional literals, it is possible to develop a graphical, client/server search interface for ISIS databases (in an Internet and Intranet environment).
In brief, the WWW browser (client) collects the data through forms and sends the data to the WWW server, that calls the CGI application (script or program) specified in the ACTION attribute of the FORM element. The CGI application sends its output to the WWW server that transfers it to the WWW browser. This client-server interchange of data usually repeats several times allowing interactivity between a user and a database.