Testing rules

WebCopy includes a helper tool that can check to see if a given URI 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 URI field, enter the URI you wish to test. Alternatively, click the Browse button to choose any URI present in the current project
2. Optionally, set the Option field to either Include or Exclude to determine an overall result for the check
3. 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 URI.

In addition, an overall status is displayed that states if the given URI was matched against the specified option. You can use this status to determine if a URI 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
	The rule was ran and but was not a match
	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 URI http://forums.example.com/forum/lore/ against these 5 rules, the following results can be observed

1. The first rule was a match , which would exclude this address
2. The second rule was not a match
3. The third rule was a match , which changes the final result from exclude to include
4. The third rule also has the "Stop Processing" flag set, so rules 4 and 5 were not processed