Testing rules

WebCopy includes a helper tool that can check to see if a given URL is a match for any rules in a project.

Opening the rule checker

• Select Rule Checker from the Tools menu

Using the rule checker

1. In the URL field, enter the address you wish to test. Alternatively, click the Browse button to choose any URL present in the current project
2. Optionally, enter a MIME type into the Content Type field if you are using rules that match against types
3. Set the Option field to either Include or Exclude to determine an overall result for the check
4. Click the Test button to test the rule

The Results list shows all rules in the current project. For each rule, a status will be displayed showing how the rule was processed against the source URL.

In addition, an overall status is displayed that states if the given URL was matched against the specified option. You can use this status to determine if a URL will be correctly included or excluded from a crawl of the source website.

Key

Each rule will display one of four different states as outlined below.

Icon	Description
	The rule was ran and was a match for the specified option
	The rule was ran and but was not a match for the specified option
	The rule was not ran as an earlier matched rule had the "Stop Processing" flag set
	The rule was not ran as it is disabled

Example

In the above example, a sample project has 5 rules defined. When testing the URL http://forums.example.com/forum/lore/ against these 5 rules, the following results can be observed

1. The first rule was a match , setting the overall result to Exclude
2. The second rule was not a match
3. The third rule was a match , setting the overall result to Include
4. The third rule also has the Stop Processing flag set, so rules 4 and 5 were automatically skipped