User Documentation
Welcome to the user's documentation of Specitem Database. This page is meant to teach you how to use the web interface of our application to manage specification items (or specitem for short). If you are interested in only using the API, please refer to here. If your server is already deployed, please change the server IP-adress in the file /frontend/src/constants/serverAdress.js, accordingly.
After building and starting our program, you will see the homepage of the web application. To add or update specitems, you need to click on the "Add Document" button, which will link you to a new page. On this page, with "Select File" button, you can choose the text file containing the specitems you want to add. The text file must have the following format. The process ends with the "Upload Document" button. The user will receive a success message back if the upload is successful and the new specitems are stored on the server, or an error message if the file format happens to be incorrect. The updating happens in a similar process. The already existing specitems on the server that have the same short names (or ID) as the new ones will be overwritten.
With the "Show Documents" button from the homepage, you can arrive at a page where there is a table filled with existing specitems to be seen. You can search for the specitems with a short name (ID) or filter out specitems which's contents contain specific words. You can also choose with the checkboxes which columns are to be displayed if the information is too overwhelming. With the 'Show'/'Hide' button next to each specitem, the full information of them can be shown.
If you click on the short name of a specitem in the specitems page, you will be link to a single page dedicated for that specitem. Here you can add and delete tags. With the "View History" button you will arrive to a page similar to the list of specitems page, but it only shows all versions of that single specitem, instead. Every time there is a commit or the tags are updated, a new version of the said specitem are created and can be viewed here. There is also a function to compare two arbitrary versions to see what has been deleted and what has been newly added.
At the page where you can view the table of specitems, in the bottom right corners there is a button "Save To Export", with which you can export the (filtered) specitems to a downloadable file in this format. To do that, after clicking on that button, you need to go back to the homepage and go to "Export". There, the to-be-exported specitems can be seen. With "Get Download Link" the user can download the text file that represents the specitems.