Re: [Openaaq-discuss] How to make AAQ running on windows

[Michael M. <mi...@wi...>]

Alex Polkovsky wrote:

>Michael, I have a bunch of questions for you.
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Hi Alex,

Attached is a tar archive containing the new programs I wrote for
posting AAQ questions.  Below are my answers to your previous questions. 

Here are some notes about my new code:

There are three programs:  post_public, post_postsecondary, and
choose_institution:
  post_public posts questions for public libraries
  post_postsecondary posts questions for post secondary libraries but
requires that a parameter be passed specifying which institution (as the
values of the form depend on the institution).
  choose_institution generates a form for picking an institution and
submits to post_postsecondary (not used for post_public at all).

There are a number of html and text files that are all templates used by
the programs.  All pages that the programs display come from a
template.  So the appearance can be changed completely just by editing a
few templates. 

I use Text::FastTemplate for templating.  I believe it is the
appropriate templating system for these quick and dirty scripts.   The
template toolkit might be more appropriate for a better designed and
larger system.

The new programs do a fair bit of error checking.  Almost anything  (but
not everything) that could go wrong will be caught.  I don't really do
anything special if an error condition occurs yet.  I plan to add some
logging abilities later.

I don't do any checks on input which is very bad.  The old OpenAAQ is
vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks and this code is too.

To use the programs you will need to at least edit the database username
and password constants.

My new programs create a new customer account for every question.  At
first that might look like an error or a bug, but it is the desired
behavior.  We were facing a problem of customers who had multiple
affiliations, or who had changed affiliation, or who had changed email
addresses.  Since there is no account managment option for the customers
we decided that a quick and dirty hack would work.  The customer has no
"account" as far as they are concerned and they must provide their
affiliation and contact info with every question.  We still create new
customer accounts... one per question.  At some later date I will write
a program to reap old accounts.  I don't think this is the correct
solution... but it was as good as I could get for next to zero effort. ;-)

I am working on another change to AAQ right now as well.  I was asked to
allow for two-way-conversation between customer and librarian.  Again, I
need to apply as little effort as possible.  So I am going to use
"variable envelope return paths" to assign a unique email address to
every question.  A customer can reply to the notification email they
get, and their replies will be appended to the original question (in the
database it will be added as addition text in some way).   I have not
completed this portion yet, but I will share it when it is ready.  It
will depend on having a mail server such as qmail or postfix where you
can have email address like "aaq...@yo..." where
"anything" could be some ID number and all email to addresses starting
with "aaq-" will be sent to a program that parses them.  The program
parses out the ID after the "aaq-" part to identify what question the
email should be appended too.

>What version of MySQL are you running?
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The latest in the 4.0.X series.  I will be upgrading to 4.1 very soon.

>Are you using a standard perl module for te HTML templates?
>  
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Text::FastTemplate

It is about as light weight as you can get.  It outperforms
HTML::Template and has a simple syntax.  Not powerful like the template
toolkit though.  For a short CGI that is not part of a much larger
infrastructure, Text::FastTemplate is my favorite.

>You wrote two scripts, but OAAQ has the database driven functions for
>creating modified pages for just such an implementation. Did the
>shared.pl code (gross as it is) get in your way?
>  
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Sadly, I did have problems getting the existing code to work.  I
inititally made modifications to the existing post.pl program.  But
things were not displaying the way I expect.  I am familiar with the
code and felt I had covered my bases, but after about 4 hours of
debugging I decided to take a more daring path and wrote a new post
script and ended up liking it.

>I like your Net::SMTP implementation. That would take one more
>uncertainty out of installation. I may grab that idea.
>  
>
It is more or less easy to use and you can get some debugging info in
the event that mail cannot be delivered.

>I'm pushing myself to redo post.pl under the followig design:
>
>1. same one page model; any preceeding pages can be used to profile a
>user by imagemap, preceeding form or a user login mechanism belonging
>to the site.
>
>  
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I was also thinking that an AJAX (danger... buzzword) client might be
interesting.  Right now I use two programs for the postsecondary part,
but with AJAX that could be one "form" with several web services behind it.

>2. Complete HTML page or Apache server side include. a server side
>include is called in the page with
><!--#exec cmd="/location/post.pl '$QUERY_STRING'" -->
>and this permits OAAQ to function in complicated HTML sites. Also, you
>will one day be able to use c/post.pl to add a post form to the same
>page that c/search.pl adds a search form to.
>  
>
That is a really neat idea.  You could convert my program do that by
simply changing the templates I think.

>4. Email verification will split email on the @ and attempt to resolve
>the IP address of the mail server. I'm guessing Net::SMTP could request
>verification of an account from a mail server, but I think too many
>servers will not reply out of some setting meant to filter spam.
>  
>
I did put in a small bit of code to check the sanity of the email
address.  If the email address looks wrong it tells the user but allows
them to use the "bad" email address if they check a checkbox.  This
helps in situations where someone might have a valid email address but
that is weird enough that we might think it is wrong. (emails with
punctuation for example).

>5. support for sites reuiring no email in favor of phone. Later, I will
>look at staff modules to allow phone as the responce method and a "do
>not send responce" swich.
>  
>
That's a good idea.

>6. create a new client record for every post. that may seem like bad
>database design, completely ignoring normalization, but without a
>verifiably unique key I'm stuck.
>  
>
Haha... that is exactly what I did.  Great idea!  In the long run it
would be nice to be able to install OpenAAQ and as an admin choose
weather there should be accounts or no accounts.  If there are accounts
it would be nice to have an account managment applications that users
could access to update their contact info, select affiliations etc.  Of
course if they could do that it just begs more questions about how the
system would work.


>Alex
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>ope...@li... wrote:
>  
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>>Hello Everyone,
>>
>>I also have something to contribute. Recently I re-wrote the AAQ client
>>(post.pl essentially). I wrote two new version (one for the public
>>library users at my consortium and one for the post-secondary users). I
>>made some significant changes.
>>
>>1) The HTML the program displays and the email it sends out are based on
>>templates
>>2) I use Net::SMTP to send email
>>3) There is more error checking in the database code
>>4) I use transactions in the database code (so if one pieces fails the
>>whole thing stops and rollsback what it was doing).
>>5) User registration is not required (the system stores all the user
>>info but does not track the user's identity with a cookie)
>>6) One screen is used to collect all information from the user
>>
>>I will make the new code available as soon as possible.
>>
>>    
>>
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