Customizing the default webserver¶
Without changing anything in q you can make a kdb+ session serve up static content by creating a directory called html underneath your QHOME directory. This is the root server for the webserver (like the Apache /var/www/html) and is the place to save static content to be served up from kdb+. Try for example saving a favicon.ico file there and calling up a page.
The default location can be changed by setting the variable .h.HOME.
Every HTTP request that comes into a q session is handled by .z.ph. By default it simply wraps the output from showing the data requested inside a fixed width tag (xmp) and sends it back. This is fast and simple, and will work in all browsers – even Internet Explorer – but makes it very difficult to apply any CSS styling to the data.
If you’re prepared to make changes, the sample code in
simongarland/doth shows how to modify the .z.ph code to output table data as a simple HTML table, and then to add Javascript and CSS files to decorate the output. To use it, put the doth.k file in your QHOME, and the two plaid.* files in your QHOME/html directory – create it if necessary - then \l doth.k.
The JavaScript used to do the formatting of the rows and columns came from an article “Plaid-Striped HTML Tables” (no longer available), but the same thing could be done with any of the many other solutions you’ll find with a quick Google.
