Hacking Summon for Fun and Profit (part 1)

OK, I’ll admit it, I’ve fallen in love with jQuery over the last 18 months 🙂
I’ve ended up using quite a bit of jQuery in our new reading list software (“MyReading”), to add various bells and whistles, including dropping an “add to MyReading” option into the Summon interface.
Like they say, “when you’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail”, once you know a bit of jQuery, every web page looks hackable, so I’ve pondering what else might be fun and/or sensible to do. To be honest, I really like the Summon interface, so making any major changes to it feels a bit like drawing a moustache on the Mona Lisa (or Mr Graham Stone, for that matter).
So, rather than hack the interface around too much, you could use jQuery to start collecting usage data from Summon (“hmmmm… [drool] usage data!”)…

…or maybe add a helpful hint if a search brings back a silly number of results?

To do the above, you’ll need to host a JavaScript file on your own web server and then include a link to that file in the Summon Administration options, e.g.

Because Summon already uses jQuery, it means you can put jQuery code into your JavaScript file without having to worry about loading the jQuery library yourself. To do the above helpful hint, you could use the following 7 lines of code:

$(document).ready(function() {
  var count = $('#summary .highlight:last').html( );
  count = count.replace(/[^0-9]/g,'');
  if( count > 50000 ) {
    $('#summary').append('<div style="margin-top:5px;"><span id="refineSearchHelp" style="display:none; font-style:italic;">Too many results? Use the options below to refine your search...</span>&nbsp;</div>');
    $('#refineSearchHelp').delay(1000).fadeIn(1000);
} });

Let’s walk through each of those lines…
line 1
Typically, you don’t want your jQuery JavaScript to run until the web page has finished loading, so you’ll often see this line of code — it ensures what follows won’t be executed until after the web page has loaded. If you’ve coded JavaScript before, you’ll probably be familiar with using the onload event in the body HTML tag to do that.
line 2
jQuery lets you easily grab bits of the web page, typically by referencing id attributes (which should be unique) and/or class attributes (which can be repeated). In the same way that CSS uses “#” and “.” to style ids and classes, jQuery uses them to select elements of the page.
If you hunt through the source of a Summon results page, you’ll find something like the following bit of HTML…

<h1 id="summary">
<span class="label">Search Results:</span>
Your search for
<span class='highlight'>germany</span>
returned
<span class='highlight'>3,892,793</span>
results
</h1>

…so, the number of results (3,892,793) appears in a span with a class value of highlight, which itself is inside a h1 with an id of summary. Unfortunately, there’s another span that also has the same class value before it, so we need to use :last in the jQuery to make sure we fetch the HTML contents of the second (i.e. last) span.
line 3
OK, at this point, we should have a JavaScript variable named count that contains the string 3,892,793, so this line strips out the commas (in fact, it strips out anything that isn’t a digit), which should leave count containing 3892793.
line 4
How many results is too many results? Let’s say we’ll display the message for anything more than 50,000 results…
line 5
Time for some more jQuery! 🙂
jQuery lets you add new bits of HTML to a page, so let’s create a new div — that will appear underneath the results summary message — by appending it to that existing h1. Just to show off, we’re going to have the helpful hint gradually fade in, so we’ll pop the text within its own span that has an id value of refineSearchHelp and we’ll style it so it’s initially hidden (display:none).
In case you’re wondering, I added that space character &nbsp; just so that the div contains something to start off with, which should ensure the page doesn’t suddenly jump as the hint fades in.
line 6
So, now that we’ve got our helpful hint in a hidden span, let’s wait a second (delay(1000) …OK, we’ll actually wait 1,000 milliseconds!) before letting the message gradually fade in (fadeIn(1000)).
line 7
We’ve got to balance the books, so for every brace and bracket we’ve opened, we need to close them, otherwise the web browser might get upset.
Disclaimer!
Dropping jQuery into Summon isn’t officially supported by Serials Solutions, so be sure to take full responsibility for anything to do and thoroughly test it to make sure you’ve not broken Summon for your users, otherwise they’ll be grumpy.
The other thing to be aware of is that Summon is in a state of coninual development, so you’ll need to test any tweaks you’ve made after each update (to make sure that they still work) and that they don’t conflict with any changes Serials Solutions have made to the Summon HTML.
Appendum
By subverting the “Custom Link” option to insert the JavaScript file, you lose the opportunity to add in a normal custom link (this appears to the left of the “Help | About | Feedback” options at the top right of the Summon interface)… or do you?
Well, there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t use jQuery to do that and, in fact, rather than just having one custom link, you could add 2 or 3…

$('#topbar .link').prepend('<a href="https://library.hud.ac.uk/wiki/">A to Z List of Electronic Resources</a>');

The default links appear in a div with a class of link, which has a parent div with an id of topbar. To add in our new extra link before those existing links, we have to prepend it.

4 thoughts on “Hacking Summon for Fun and Profit (part 1)”

  1. Ah! So that would also let me add a custom page header? ’cause SS’s idea of “badging” pretty much sucks, yeah?

  2. Hi Steve
    I’m actually quite a fan of the minimalist branding! 😉
    Certainly jQuery will let you insert a new HTML banner into the page, but be sure to test it on a few different browsers and OS platforms afterwards.

  3. This was a great read! Keep us up to date with all the new tweaks, it’s always interesting.

Comments are closed.