How to configure your site...

The grid produced from the HTML you insert into your site is very configurable. It can also be set up with no configuration which will give you a default output format with no extra effort on your part. This page will be an ongoing project to explain the features available.

General Overview

As mentioned on some other pages, IPSND Partners have the abilily to put a single line of HTML into their sites which dynamically links and displays data from the live IPSND database. This allows people to list game specific serial numbers on their sites and have visitors to their sites register new serials number easily while also get new registrations from the IPSND and any other Partner site automatically with no extra effort from the webmasters.

An example of what HTML you place into your site to accomplish this is...

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://ipsnd.net/affiliate.ashx?id=2554" />

As you can see, it doesn't require any type of rocket science to do this. Because the solution is purely HTML with JavaScript, this will work on any site whether it is based on PHP, Perl, Dreamweaver, ASP, Python, or any other programming language.

The code above will produce a grid in your site that looks just like the following... (this example shows Williams 1982 game Thunderball which has an IPDB/IPSND number of 2554)

Customizing the Grid

The grid output by the script above is very customizable. This allows you to change two major things about the resulting data... appearance and content.

Changing the Appearance

The IPSND datagrid supports 22 out-of-the-box skins that you can easily choose from simply by modifying the code example above. The Skinning Examples Page shows all skins and the associated code example to use that skin. This configuration is very simple to implement and would be the best bet if you are not very comfortable with the inner-workings of HTML and CSS.

The output grid fully utilizes CSS. By default, all aspects of the outputted data can be customized in any way you want by creating a new CSS file and manually including it on your site. This approach is probably the most useful to experienced webmasters that can create semi-complex CSS. Documenting all the ID's and Class' here is probably out of the scope of this document and you can see the inherent style's by looking at the source code. When a grid is output from the IPSND, a default CSS file is automatically 'included' in your site directly before the actual data is streamed to your client web browser. In some circumstances, this default CSS may override any custom CSS you might have on your site. You may turn off this CSS file from being included by changing adding the 'nocss' parameter to your include script and setting it to 'true'.

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://ipsnd.net/affiliate.ashx?id=2554&nocss=true" />

Changing the Content

In the examples above, the resulting data grid has 5 default columns, they are...

• Serial Number
• Submitted By
• Country
• Condition
• Date of Submission

If these columns are acceptable to you, no further changes are necessary for your included code. However, if you would like different columns or would like these columns in a different order then you can specify additional info in your script line. The following columns are available to chose from. Following the description is a 4-digit code for that column. These codes are what you will add into your script and instructions are directly below.

• Serial Number (snum) - The submitted Serial Number
• Submitted By (suby) - The name of the person that submitted the serial number.
• Country (cnty) - The country of the submission.
• Game Condition (cond) - The condition of the game (Complete, Parts or Unknown)
• Submission Date (subd) - The date of the serial number submission.
• Game Part (gamp) - The description of the game 'part' with the serial (Head+Body, Body Only, Head Only)
• Game Owner (ownr) - A boolean flag that is true if the submitter owned the game at the time.
• IPSND Status (stat) - The status of the submission at the IPSND (Submitted, Verified, Validated)
• Comment (cmnt) - The text comment that a submitter can provide with each submission.
• Serial Number ID (snid) - The unique id of the serial number at the IPSND.
• Game Trait X (cdf[x]) - If there are traits defined for a game, you may specify them as cdf1, cdf2, cdf3, etc

In order to specify the columns you want to see, you simply concatenate the column codes together in a comma-delimited list and pass that string to the script URL with the 'columns' parameter name. For example... this script below, will return Serial Number, SubmittedBy, Trait #1 and Submission Date for Williams 1981 game Jungle Lord which is IPDBID/IPSNDID of 1338....

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://ipsnd.net/affiliate.ashx?id=1338&columns=snum,suby,cdf1,subd"></script>