There will be times when you want to use a NetCloak command and specify a series of possible criteria. For example, you may want to hide a portion of advanced HTML from early versions of Netscape, Explorer (and maybe even Mosaic) users. Or you may want to show a portion of a page only to those users that are in your internal IP domain, which spans several ranges.

Figure 8: The Groups tab of the NetCloak Lists window.

To make these commands easier to use, NetCloak includes a "groups" feature, which allows you to create a group of parameters that can then be used by name within any NetCloak command. You can create and manage groups from within the NetCloak user interface, and then simply refer to the name of the group instead of each item individually in NetCloak commands on your pages. This makes on-going maintenance easier by allowing you to change the group without having to update your HTML pages. It also makes reusing lists easy anywhere on your Web site... Just define the group once and use it anywhere.

Editing groups is done on the "Groups" pane of the "Lists" window. The window is opened from the "Edit Lists..." option of the "Configuration" menu.

The example above has several groups already created, including one called "SuperUsers". To see the items in any group, simply click on it and the "Items" list will change to a list of the items in the selected group.

Removing a single item or an entire group is as simple as selecting the item or group and clicking the appropriate "Remove" button.

To create a new group, enter the name of the group into the text entry field underneath the groups list, then click the "Add Group" button. The currently selected group or item has no effect when adding a group.

To add items to a group, first click on the name of the group in the groups list to select it. Then enter the name of the item to add to the group in the text field beneath the items list and click "Add Item".

Once you have created your groups, click "OK" and they will be saved to the "NetCloak.groups" file. Note that you can also edit this file manually with a text editor. Each line in the ".groups" file represents one group.

To use a group in any NetCloak command, refer to it by name within the command, preceded by an exclamation point ("!"). The exclamation point tells NetCloak to look for and use a group rather than try to use the group name as a parameter.

Let's look at the "SupportsTables" example shown in the sample dialog above. Here is the HTML syntax for showing a table to certain browsers, without using groups:

     <HIDE><SHOW_CLIENT Mozilla MSIE Mosaic>     <TABLE>     <TR><TD>...

By creating the "SupportsTables" group, we simplify this to:

     <HIDE><SHOW_CLIENT !SupportsTables>     <TABLE>     <TR><TD>...

Not only does this simplify the HTML, but when a new browser comes out that supports tables, you simply add the browser to the group. No changes are needed to the HTML pages at all.