CUCC Expedition Handbook - New Cave data

Creating a new cave in the online system

Great, I have discovered a new cave...

If you have not come to this page from the sequence starting at Starting a New Cave" then go and read that first.

Process

This page and those following describe the process for creating new caves and entrances, and especially how to add images/surveys so that they appear correctly online.

Two ways of creating a new cave in the online system

• Filling in the online form
• Editing a file and uploading it

For experienced people creating a batch of small caves the file upload & import process is quicker. Most people won't use this method for their first cave so it is documented separately in new cave file method.

In other words you can either add caves (or entrances) using the web-interface or you can check out the 'expoweb' repository using the version control system and just edit the files.

Nevertheless you will find it useful when filling out the form for the first time to have some idea what is going on behind the scenes. So you are recommended to have a quick look at the new cave file method even if you have no intention of using it.

Recommended procedure

You will find the process a lot easier to follow if you Edit an existing cave first, because then you can see all the necesary fields filled in. You can then fill out the form for your new cave using that as an example to follow. But of course be very careful not to actually chenge anything on the form you have open for editing.

New Cave Number

For a totally new cave you will be using a temporary number such as 2017-CUCC-24 or 2018-dm-07, not an Austrian official-issued Kataster number. But you may have been surveying a new passage in an established cave in which case you will need to find out if it has recently been issued with a Kataster number.

The list in the "Caves" page (the menu item "Caves" in the vertical menu in the top-left of the page you are reading now) shows all the caves which have been already "created" within the online system. You can see a slightly-more updated list in the Cave Number Index which includes caves which are in the process of being registered but may not have been "created" using either of the two methods described here.

New Cave form

The links to follow to open up the "New Cave" form or the "Edit Cave" forms are somewhat obscure. Go to the main cave index page which lists all the caves: Cave Index and on the right of the page, between the 1626 caves and the 1623 caves, it says
New Cave
just above where it also says "Cave Number Index - kept updated".
But don't click on it yet, first we will edit an old cave.

Edit Cave form

First make sure that you are logged-in to the troggle website. You almost certainly are already, but if you are trying this on a new machine this can catch you out. Go to /accounts/login/. The username is "expo" and the password is the usual "{cavey}:{beery}" one.

• Now open the cave page for an existing cave, e.g. Plateauhöhle 172.
• Now you are looking at the description of the cave. Take a moment to look at the URL in the title bar of your browser: the URL is /1623/172.htm. Remember this, we will come back to it.
• Now you can see a new option saying "Edit this cave" at the bottom of the top left-hand menu. It has a little icon of a pen next to it. But don't click on it yet.
• First, scroll down the page until you see the heading "Entrances". This cave has only one entrance but other caves may have more. You can see that the information about the entrance, including the all-important photograph, is indented slightly to indicate that this is Entrance information, not Cave information.
• Just under the heading "Entrances" there is a link "Edit". This will take you to the form for editing entrances, not the form for editing caves.
• Now go the left-hand menu and look for the option "Edit this cave"
• Click on it. A form appears.
• Scroll down the page - it is a long form - and look at the "URL" field. This is the critical field to get right when you create your own cave using the New Cave form. The URL is where your cave will be published by the system, so if you put something strange here, no one will be able to find it. This field is where you tell the system where you want the cave description to be published.
  Some of the fields are expandable (you can drag the bottom-right corner to make the box bigger).

Now let's look at another cave:

• The cave nearby: Plateauhöhle 171.
• Here you can see that it has two entrances.
• Take a note of the URL: /1623/171/171.htm. Aha. Not quite the same is it.
• Now go the left-hand menu and click on "Edit this cave"
• You can see that both entrances are listed at the bottom of the form, and that the URL field matches the one you saw for the cave description: /1623/171/171.htm.
• The reason the URL has a different structure is that cave 171 has a lot of photographs associated with it (unlike 172), and these photos have been put in a separate folder /171/ .
• This cave also has a correct link to a survex file under the heading "Survex File" Click on This survex file and you can see the names and details of the survey done in 2016 by Jenny and Olly. Click on '3d download' in the cave description page and you will open the centreline in 3d on your computer - if you have survex installed (which you should do: Olly wrote it and he will be upset if you don't).

Behind the scenes, you are editing different .xml files for the cave and for each entrance. Troggle collects these together to make an XML page for the cave (or entrance). So each field you fill in on the form may contain arbitrary HTML. Be careful!

Gotcha

When creating a new cave you have just discovered, you can't create the entrance the first time you are on the form.

Create the cave, click the Submit button to save it to the system.

The next page will be your cave page as if you had clicked on its name in the "Caves" page.

Now you can now click on "New Entrance" at the bottom of the description page to create and edit the entrance details.

List of New Cave/Cave_data fields

The full list of fields is documented: the full list of data-entry fields when creating a cave.

Back to the previous page in this sequence New rigging guide.
A side trip to see an explantion of all the fields on the form
A side trip to see how to do this as a file upload process using git, the cave description data file
Now go the the next page in this sequence Write the full cave descriptions with diagrams.