Catalog.txt

From CONTENTdm Users Wiki

The title of this article should be catalog.txt. The initial letter is capitalized and an underscore is substituted or omitted because of technical restrictions.

[edit] purpose

catalog.txt is the master list of all collections that exist on your server.

[edit] format

preamble (this is optional, except for maybe the first line)

>CATALOG

#
# 1. This is the catalog file for CONTENTdm
#

each collection gets a single line with three elements separated by tabs (two tabs between the alias and the name, one tab between the name and the path).

/collectionalias^I^IName of Collection^I/path/to/collection/directory

an example catalog.txt displayed with cat -vet to show white space

>CATALOG$
$
#$
# 1. This is the catalog file for CONTENTdm$
#$
$
/dce^I^IDublic Core Elements^I/data/collections/dce$
/jkt^I^IThe Fabulous Collection of Josh Kline^I/data/collections/jkt$
/stc^I^ISenior Theses From The Claremont Colleges^I/data/collections/stc$
/met^I^IMike Emery^I/data/collections/met$
/coc^I^ICCDL Collections^I/data/collections/coc$

^I represents a tab character.

Line endings are UNIX style: $ represents a line feed (\n).

[edit] notes

You cannot move catalog.txt to another directory because the path to is is hard coded into the compiled CONTENTdm programs.
You cannot use a symlink in place of catalog.txt because CONTENTdm deletes and recreates it to make edits.
The previous version is stored in catalog.txt.old
see preventing remote access to catalog.txt
due to its simple format you can easily write a collection creation script
catalog.txt is parsed by the API functions dmGetCollectionList and dmGetCollectionParameters in DMSystem.php