Frequently Asked Question

In order to be able to automate transformation of Encompass links to links in our own domain, we needed to emulate the Encompass structure. We did not find documentation on the Encompass file structures, but through observation determined two key items:

1. The web page address for all pages in a Group website was determined by Group ID (gid) and Page ID (pgid). We further determined that [gid] was a constant for the Group. In our case, for the MIT Class of 1964, gid=55. We also found that [pgid] was not sequential, and we concluded that [pgid] was probably unique within the entire community, but in any event, we would need to identify all the [pgids] for each [gid] we wished to migrate.
2. All images and document inserted into, or referenced by, an Encompass page were stored in an image gallery or document gallery that were addressed by [gid] and a file hierarchy with [editor] (for images) and [editor_documents] (for documents) as the root folders.
   

From these observations, we created a file structure on our domain, MIT1964.org with Class Year, and [gid] folders. All PDF pages were stored in the [gid] folder with the PDF files named [pgid99999].

The Alumni Association responded to our request and delivered the entire [editor] and [editor_documents] file space hierarchy from Encompass, which we loaded into our own [gid] folder.

This structure, then, allowed us to use scripts to transform all Encompass URLs in our generated PDF files to the corresponding MIT1964.org URL.

Thus, a bulk capture of all Encompass content, bulk generation of PDFs for all pages, and bulk transformation of URLs in these PDFs, and their upload into the MIT1964.org/1964/gid55/ folder produced the complete Encompass website for the Class.

[DES 5-13-2024]