openinteract-dev — For OI developers, includes project coordination and technical discussion.

Re: [Openinteract-dev] Using packages

[Chris W. <ch...@cw...>]

* Drew Taylor (dr...@dr...) [011029 21:38]:
> Hmmm, things seem to be working now. I restarted Apache a couple of
> times, but I swear I did that before sending this post. Anyway, I'm
> off to dissect the News and Classified modules so I can see how
> things are done.

I was actually just getting ready to reply with this -- you have to
stop Apache, then restart it. SPOPS doesn't play well with a -HUP
restart. I was going to say it's in the FAQ, but it's not. (It will be
in a second tho...)

> One other thing before I go. I'm trying to figure out how to change
> the top of the page (the one w/ the OI logo and the "Home | Users |
> Groups | Pages" text. Where is this stored? I've looked through all
> the templates I thought might be relevant and can't find a thing!

It's in base_theme/template/base_main.tmpl -- but you can change
this by editing the theme and setting the 'main_template'
property. This should be in a 'package::name' format, unless you put
the template in the $WEBSITE/template directory, in which case you can
just use 'name'.

I plan to make this location for the main template (and the 'simple'
template) the default in the future -- it's more intuitive.

> Thanks for an awesome framework Chris! I look forward to delving
> into OI applications.

Thanks! I look forward to seeing them :-)

BTW, if anyone releases OI packages I'd be happy to put them on the SF
amd openinteract.org download areas. When we get some more packages we
can create something like at

  http://www.masonhq.com/code/contributed.html

Chris

-- 
Chris Winters (ch...@cw...)
Building enterprise-capable snack solutions since 1988.

Re: [Openinteract-dev] Using packages

[Drew T. <dr...@dr...>]

Hmmm, things seem to be working now. I restarted Apache a couple of times, 
but I swear I did that before sending this post. Anyway, I'm off to dissect 
the News and Classified modules so I can see how things are done.

One other thing before I go. I'm trying to figure out how to change the top 
of the page (the one w/ the OI logo and the "Home | Users | Groups | Pages" 
text. Where is this stored? I've looked through all the templates I thought 
might be relevant and can't find a thing!

Thanks for an awesome framework Chris! I look forward to delving into OI 
applications.

At 07:24 PM 10/29/2001 -0500, you wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I've recently installed OI (yay!) and now I'm trying to use the classified 
>package. I've installed the package to the website dir. But I can't seem 
>to get to the application. The templates are viewable in the Template 
>list, and the DB table was created. But when I try to go to /Classified 
>(as described in the action.perl file, I get a Not Found error.

Drew Taylor                     JA[P|m_p|SQL]H
http://www.drewtaylor.com/      Just Another Perl|mod_perl|SQL Hacker
mailto:dr...@dr...      *** God bless America! ***
ICQ: 135298242

[Openinteract-dev] Using packages

[Drew T. <dr...@dr...>]

Hi,

I've recently installed OI (yay!) and now I'm trying to use the classified 
package. I've installed the package to the website dir. But I can't seem to 
get to the application. The templates are viewable in the Template list, 
and the DB table was created. But when I try to go to /Classified (as 
described in the action.perl file, I get a Not Found error.

Any thoughts?

Drew Taylor                     JA[P|m_p|SQL]H
http://www.drewtaylor.com/      Just Another Perl|mod_perl|SQL Hacker
mailto:dr...@dr...      *** God bless America! ***
ICQ: 135298242

Re: [Openinteract-dev] Tested platforms

[Chris W. <ch...@cw...>]

* Drew Taylor (dr...@dr...) [011029 04:08]:
> I noticed somewhere in the docs that OI had not yet been tested w/ 5.6.x. 
> I'm running 5.6.1 w/ Apache 1.3.22 and mod_perl 1.26 and haven't noticed 
> any problems yet. What do you need to "officially" conclude that it works 
> w/ recent perl versions?

Update the docs :-) I need to read them over and do this anyway --
they're getting a little stale. I hope to start a manual similar to
the one started in SPOPS (which was copied from the TT manual).

Thanks,

Chris

-- 
Chris Winters (ch...@cw...)
Building enterprise-capable snack solutions since 1988.

Re: [Openinteract-dev] Documentation patch

[Chris W. <ch...@cw...>]

* Drew Taylor (dr...@dr...) [011029 04:00]:
> Hi,
> 
> I finally managed to get around to actually installing OI! As such I was 
> browsing through the docs and came across a very minor HTML bug. Here's a 
> patch for it. I look forward to playing w/ OI in the near future. I'm sure 
> I'll have lots of questions... :-)

Great! We'll look forward to them :-)

> [drew@nephi oi_docs]$ diff -u admin.html.orig admin.html
> +++ admin.html  Mon Oct 29 07:39:13 2001
> @@ -458,7 +458,7 @@
>    <li><b>log</b>: Directory where logs are kept. This needs to be
>    writeable by the webserver user.</li>
> 
> -  <li><b>cache: If you're using the default caching module that
> +  <li><b>cache</b>: If you're using the default caching module that
>    utilizes the filesystem, the caching will be done in this
>    directory. This needs to be writeable by the webserver user.</li>

Ah, thanks much. Fixed.

Chris

-- 
Chris Winters (ch...@cw...)
Building enterprise-capable snack solutions since 1988.

[Openinteract-dev] Tested platforms

[Drew T. <dr...@dr...>]

I noticed somewhere in the docs that OI had not yet been tested w/ 5.6.x. 
I'm running 5.6.1 w/ Apache 1.3.22 and mod_perl 1.26 and haven't noticed 
any problems yet. What do you need to "officially" conclude that it works 
w/ recent perl versions?

[drew@nephi oi_docs]$ telnet home.drewtaylor.com 80
Trying 66.92.71.61...
Connected to home.drewtaylor.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2001 12:52:18 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.22 (Unix) mod_perl/1.26
X-Powered-By: OpenInteract 1.28

[drew@nephi oi_docs]$ /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -v
Server version: Apache/1.3.22 (Unix)
Server built:   Oct 17 2001 16:24:10

[drew@nephi oi_docs]$ perl -v

This is perl, v5.6.1 built for i686-linux

[drew@nephi oi_docs]$ uname -a
Linux nephi 2.4.2-2 #1 Sun Apr 8 20:41:30 EDT 2001 i686 unknown (Redhat 7.1)


Drew Taylor                     JA[P|m_p|SQL]H
http://www.drewtaylor.com/      Just Another Perl|mod_perl|SQL Hacker
mailto:dr...@dr...      *** God bless America! ***
ICQ: 135298242

[Openinteract-dev] Documentation patch

[Drew T. <dr...@dr...>]

Hi,

I finally managed to get around to actually installing OI! As such I was 
browsing through the docs and came across a very minor HTML bug. Here's a 
patch for it. I look forward to playing w/ OI in the near future. I'm sure 
I'll have lots of questions... :-)

[drew@nephi oi_docs]$ diff -u admin.html.orig admin.html
--- admin.html.orig     Mon Oct 29 07:39:03 2001
+++ admin.html  Mon Oct 29 07:39:13 2001
@@ -458,7 +458,7 @@
    <li><b>log</b>: Directory where logs are kept. This needs to be
    writeable by the webserver user.</li>

-  <li><b>cache: If you're using the default caching module that
+  <li><b>cache</b>: If you're using the default caching module that
    utilizes the filesystem, the caching will be done in this
    directory. This needs to be writeable by the webserver user.</li>


Drew Taylor                     JA[P|m_p|SQL]H
http://www.drewtaylor.com/      Just Another Perl|mod_perl|SQL Hacker
mailto:dr...@dr...      *** God bless America! ***
ICQ: 135298242

[Openinteract-dev] (fwd) Re: [Openinteract-help] fruit-0.09

[Chris W. <ch...@cw...>]

Thought this might be interesting for the whole group.

Chris

----- Forwarded message from Chris Winters <ch...@cw...> -----

From: Chris Winters <ch...@cw...>
To: Mike Eggleston <mi...@mi...>
Subject: Re: [Openinteract-help] fruit-0.09
Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2001 22:46:48 -0400
Message-ID: <200...@ge...>
User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.22i

* Mike Eggleston (mi...@mi...) [011027 22:20]:
> Thanks for the help.
> Do you know of any reverse-engineering method to move existing postgres
> tables and data into OI structures so they can be made into
> packages?

Well, you can make them into objects fairly easily by using the
eg/My/DiscoverField.pm example in SPOPS -- this will be integrated
into the next version of OI. (I've named it
'OpenInteract::DiscoverField' in the example configuration below, but
you can of course name it whatever you like.)

This allows you to define an object with basically just the table name
and primary key field:

 my $config = {
   myobject => {
      class           => 'OpenInteract::MyObject',
      code_class      => [],
      isa             => [ qw/ OpenInteract::SPOPS::DBI SPOPS::DBI::Pg
                               SPOPS::DBI / ],
      rules_from      => [ 'OpenInteract::DiscoverField' ],
      field_discover  => 'yes',
      field           => [],
      id_field        => 'object_id',
      increment_field => 1,
      no_insert       => [ 'object_id' ],
      no_update       => [ 'object_id' ],
      base_table      => 'mytable',
      track           => { create => 1, update => 1, remove => 1 },
      name            => 'name_field',
      object_name     => 'MyObject',
   },
 };

Generating something like this automatically would be pretty easy,
although you'd probably generate the alias ('myobject'), class name
('OpenInteract::MyObject'), object name ('MyObject') from the table
name or something. (You'd also need to specify 'name', but that's not
hard.)

Then you can use OpenInteract::CommonHandler to generate a handler for
searching, displaying, editing and removing objects from the
tables. See OpenInteract::CommonHandler for an example -- again, some
of it you should be able to generate but you'd probably want to edit
it by hand afterward as well. (The docs for this have been updated in
CVS, and that version has a few extra features as well...)

You'd also need to generate the templates. Again, you'd probably want
to do an initial generation and then fine tune it afterward. Using the
template widgets would probably make your job easier.

Another example would be the 'classified' package that shipped with OI
1.30 -- it uses the template widgets and OpenInteract::CommonHandler.

Being able to point OI at a table and generate all this stuff, even if
you needed to fine-tune it after generating it, would be pretty
slick. 

----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
Chris Winters (ch...@cw...)
Building enterprise-capable snack solutions since 1988.

[Openinteract-dev] Re: SPOPS error handling

[Chris W. <ch...@cw...>]

* Ray Zimmerman (rz...@co...) [011022 09:32]:
> So, I was wondering, why do you use the "put the error info into some 
> error variables and die with a string" approach rather than "put the 
> error info into an object and die with that object" approach to error 
> handling in SPOPS?  Maybe there is an advantage I don't see. And the 
> follow-on question, in case it turns out the latter is more desirable 
> ... would you consider changing it?

I'll have to dig into the history books for this one...

Ah, I kind of remember. I had tried (in OpenInteract) to create a
global error handler, much like the one Matt Sergeant wrote up in the
mod_perl guide. But I had some problems with internal errors being
thrown by some modules NOT being a string -- that is, they expected a
string and died a horrible death when they couldn't examine the
string.

Do I remember the modules or the errors? Nope. This was 2+ years
ago. So instead of looking into it more, I just created the simpler
version we have now. (Lazy)

So I totally agree that it's a better way to do things, particularly
when you frequently get all the error information anyway:

----------------------------------------
my $object = eval { $class->fetch( $id ) };
if ( $@ ) {
    my $error_info = SPOPS::Error->get;
    warn "Error: $error_info->{system_msg}\n";
}
----------------------------------------

So yes, I would definitely change it. The only concern I have is
backward compatibility. There are just a few items with that.

 (1) Create a 'set()' method that is just an alias for 'new()'

 (2) Create a 'get()' method that just returns the last error object
 created, and modify 'new()' to track the last object created.

 (3) Allow people to still inspect $@ as if it were a string. We
 should be able to use 'overload' to stringify the object so people
 can do this. Simple example:

----------------------------------------
package My::Test;

use strict;
use overload '""' => \&as_string;

sub new       { return bless( $_[1], $_[0] ) }
sub as_string { return $_[0]->{user_msg} }


package main;

eval {
    die My::Test->new({ user_msg   => 'This is the user message',
                        system_msg => 'The system is going down!' });
};
if ( $@ ) {
    print "User: $@->{user_msg}\n",
          "Sys:  $@->{system_msg}\n";
    if ( $@ =~ /user/ ) {
        print "Found 'user' in error message!";
    }
}
----------------------------------------

So I think we should be good. (I'll rewrite some code that uses the
errors and see for sure.)

I don't think we need to make any other modifications to SPOPS error
handling. It's very simple and should probably continue to be so.

But...

While we're rewriting it we might want to think about any other
changes -- no reason to change the API multiple times in a short
period :-)

Chris

-- 
Chris Winters (ch...@cw...)
Building enterprise-capable snack solutions since 1988.

[Openinteract-dev] SPOPS error handling

[Ray Z. <rz...@co...>]

Chris,

For the error handling in our apps we've decided to use a sub-class 
of the Error class (as in Error.pm from CPAN) and just do something 
like ...

	die new My::Error('message', $other, $error, $info)

... where the constructor for My::Error records the stack trace, etc, 
and then use an eval block and "if ($@)" to catch it elsewhere. In 
the "if ($@)" part we can handle different types of error objects 
differently if desired.

We'd like to be able to handle our SPOPS errors in the same 
framework, but it isn't quite as clean as we'd like. Since an SPOPS 
error dies with a string, we have to somehow determine from that 
string whether it was SPOPS that died or something else (not sure how 
to do this), then, if it was SPOPS, go get the info from the SPOPS 
error variables.

So, I was wondering, why do you use the "put the error info into some 
error variables and die with a string" approach rather than "put the 
error info into an object and die with that object" approach to error 
handling in SPOPS?  Maybe there is an advantage I don't see. And the 
follow-on question, in case it turns out the latter is more desirable 
... would you consider changing it?

Thanks,

-- 
  Ray Zimmerman  / e-mail: rz...@co... / 428-B Phillips Hall
   Sr Research  /   phone: (607) 255-9645  /  Cornell University
    Associate  /      FAX: (815) 377-3932 /   Ithaca, NY  14853

[Openinteract-dev] default values for non-persisted objects

[Chris W. <ch...@cw...>]

The good ideas recently on the list regarding default values in
non-persisted objects led me to implement this in a three ways in
SPOPS:

1) Specify the default values in the class configuration
(metadata). This is completely portable across datasources (DBI, LDAP,
etc.) but leads to a synchronization problem between the object and
datasource. 

2) Specify a record that contains the values you want to use as a
default. This isn't so bad -- you don't have to deal with all the
issues Schwern brought up regarding triggers, etc. But it's still a
little klunky (something else to maintain).

3) If you're using MySQL and SPOPS::DBI::MySQL, you can just say:

  find_defaults  => 'yes'

in the configuration and it will find out the defaults for fields in
that particular table. You change the defaults, the defaults in the
object change. Cool.

I tried this for PostgreSQL (using DBD::Pg) but the functionality for
finding table information seems to not retrieve the default
info. (Sent a note to the DBD::Pg author about this.)

It's pretty simple to implement this for different implementations --
that is, it's simple to join whatever the implmentation uses to
discover defaults to SPOPS. Whether it's simple to get this
information from a particular DBMS is another question...

These will be in the next version of SPOPS. The POOP-group gets proper
credit, of course :-)

Chris

-- 
Chris Winters (ch...@cw...)
Building enterprise-capable snack solutions since 1988.

[Openinteract-dev] ESPOPS-0.4 (Enhanced SPOPS)

[Ray Z. <rz...@co...>]

Sorry, the subject of the previous mail should have said 0.4 not 0.3.

Here's an updated version of ESPOPS that works with SPOPS-0.51.

	http://www.pserc.cornell.edu/ESPOPS/ESPOPS-0.4.tar.gz

Here is the complete list of changes ...

   - Updated to work with SPOPS-0.51.
     Changed global_db_handle() to global_datasource_handle() in ESPOPS::DBI.
     Changed to 'use SPOPS 0.51' in ESPOPS::DBI.

   - Added timestamp field to the Object table.

   - Added a t/08_clone.t to test clone().

-- 
  Ray Zimmerman  / e-mail: rz...@co... / 428-B Phillips Hall
   Sr Research  /   phone: (607) 255-9645  /  Cornell University
    Associate  /      FAX: (815) 377-3932 /   Ithaca, NY  14853

[Openinteract-dev] ESPOPS-0.3 (Enhanced SPOPS)

[Ray Z. <rz...@co...>]

Here's an updated version of ESPOPS that works with SPOPS-0.51.

	http://www.pserc.cornell.edu/ESPOPS/ESPOPS-0.4.tar.gz

Here is the complete list of changes ...

   - Updated to work with SPOPS-0.51.
     Changed global_db_handle() to global_datasource_handle() in ESPOPS::DBI.
     Changed to 'use SPOPS 0.51' in ESPOPS::DBI.

   - Added timestamp field to the Object table.

   - Added a t/08_clone.t to test clone().

-- 
  Ray Zimmerman  / e-mail: rz...@co... / 428-B Phillips Hall
   Sr Research  /   phone: (607) 255-9645  /  Cornell University
    Associate  /      FAX: (815) 377-3932 /   Ithaca, NY  14853

[Openinteract-dev] warning for those using CVS

[Chris W. <ch...@cw...>]

I'm not sure if anyone uses code from CVS or the snapshots, but I'm in
the middle of making changes throughout the code regarding changes in
the structure of the server configuration file. So the usual warning
about the CVS code being potentially broken is doubly true now.

Chris

-- 
Chris Winters (ch...@cw...)
Building enterprise-capable snack solutions since 1988.

[Openinteract-dev] Re: [Openinteract-help] Static page problem

[Chris W. <ch...@cw...>]

* Peter Beardsley (pbe...@ap...) [011015 17:23]:
> I just installed OpenInteract-- it seems like everything's okay, but
> this is a problem I'm having: When I create a new static page, it
> gets put in the basic_page table fine, and I can access it by going
> to it's designated directory.  But the pages don't show up in the
> tree when I go to "List".  It shows the beginning of a tree and then
> "(2 files)", but it doesn't display the names of the files.
> 
> Any idea what this could possibly be?

Ok, figured it out. Error from reorganizing things. Easy patch
(attached, also on Sourceforge), or you can grab the modified file
SPOPS/SPOPS/ClassFactory/DefaultBehavior.pm from CVS. (I can send it
to you as well, if you like.)

Thanks for the report!

Chris

-- 
Chris Winters (ch...@cw...)
Building enterprise-capable snack solutions since 1988.

[Openinteract-dev] openinteract-commits list now available

[Chris W. <ch...@cw...>]

For people curious about the commits going into CVS, the list
'ope...@li...' has been
created. Subscribe via the normal means at:

 http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=16810

Chris

-- 
Chris Winters (ch...@cw...)
Building enterprise-capable snack solutions since 1988.

[Openinteract-dev] Re: Bug: security setting in base_template

[Chris W. <ch...@cw...>]

* Andreas Nolte (And...@Be...) [011010 05:33]:
> Hi Chris,
> 
> one small bug we found: if you add a new template with LDAP enabled,
> the group security does not get set correcty to the OI Site Admin
> group, but to a predefined value of 3. Therefore you run into
> trouble under LDAP...

This should be true not only for templates but for all new objects. If
you change:

base_template-x.xx/conf/spops.perl:

Old
----------------------------------------
              creation_security => {
                 u   => undef,
                 g   => { 3 => 'WRITE' },
                 w   => 'READ',
----------------------------------------

New
----------------------------------------
              creation_security => {
                 u   => undef,
                 g   => { 'site admin' => 'WRITE' },
                 w   => 'READ',
----------------------------------------

Then you should be good to go. You'll need to do this for all objects.

There's an item on the Sourceforge Feature Requests list to take care
of this the 'right' way:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=468907&group_id=16810&atid=366810

(sorry if the url wraps...)

BUT now that I think about it, we should be able to do a shortcut so
that we check your website's config for the group IDs when
applying the package to your website.

Hm. Maybe I'll slip this into the next version...

Later,

Chris

-- 
Chris Winters (ch...@cw...)
Building enterprise-capable snack solutions since 1988.