Re: [Phpwiki-talk] A gripe about SQL coding in phpWiki

[Reini U. <rei...@gm...>]

On 10/3/05, John Stevens <jst...@gm...> wrote:
>  <RANT>

I like rants. Thanks!

>  I hate to be a pain about this, and I know I am limited by an enterprise
> decision to use Oracle for all SQL backends, but I find the SQL coding an=
d
> the lack of any real developer documentation a HUGE downside to this wiki=
.
> I decided to implement it at my employer as I am a great advocate of Wiki
> for all types of collaborative documentation, and it suits the PHP/Oracle
> SOE here.  The basic Wiki runs fine, and people are beginning to use it a=
nd
> take it up.
>
>  The problem nows becomes, how do we make this stuff available off-line?
> Well, just dump out to html right?  Wrong.  Firstly there are errors wher=
e
> the FileFinder.php where it sets the locale to C, and no such locale exis=
ts.

Interesting. Never heard of a system where setlocale("C") fails.
Please post details to the phpwiki bug tracker. C is the mother of all loca=
les.

>  This occurs for a lot of "plugin" pages.  Then if you are are able to ge=
t
> around that one, there is the small problem really bad SQL programming.  =
I
> mean "WHERE NULL =3D NULL" and "WHERE 1" which causes Oracle to barf.  Pr=
etty
> bad programming style when these are used to simply let a lazy programmer
> append " AND something=3D$somvariable" to a conditional clause, rather th=
an do
> some testing of variables and processing them accordingly.  And if you ar=
e
> going to do it the lazy way, shouldn't you be doing it in a non SQL
> implementation specific way?  Come on!

If you dig into the sources, you will see that those TRUE statements (also =
1=3D1)
come from the search library, which is a pretty good library IMHO.
We can easily set another SQL TRUE statement for this branch, and we
haven't wrote a branch optimizer yet.
Recommendations welcome.
I'm just improving the postgresql interface, and oracle is not very far awa=
y.
(foreign keys and text search improvements)

>  And searching throuth the code, there seems to be ways to include a list=
 of
> "excluded pages" but since the coding documentation is basically
> non-existent this is impossible to fathom.  And the lack of documentation
> explaining an easy way to do it would also be helpful.  I mean, isn't thi=
s
> really what wiki is about?

You miss coding documentation? I cannot agree.
I would agree that you miss updated user documentation for such features.

>  Oracle did not work out of the box, and I posted my changes on the phpWi=
ki
> Wiki.  Have these been included in the latest releases and patches?  No. =
 Is
> there any easy way to find out how to contribute to this project?

I'll look these up. Thanks for your patches.

For the future:
Patches go to patches, bugs to bugs, feature enhancements to RFE.
("Requested Feature Enhancements")
All at the sf.net projects page.

> Well, I must be blind 'cause I haven't found much detail on that either. =
 So what
> happens if you guys release patches?  I have to trawl through the code ea=
ch
> time and make the same changes to make my oracle implementation work.  A
> real pain for me, but if I want a Wiki at work (and god knows we need one=
)
> this is what I have to do.  Such an overhead will ensure that Wiki will d=
ie
> here.

$ cd my-oracle-wiki
$ patch -N -b -p1 < ../official-wiki.patch
$ find -name \*.rej | xargs emacs

looks not much of an overhead to me.
I have about 5 different wiki's to sync, with various features to test,
and it's very painless.

>  I am more than willing to contribute to the development of the Oracle pa=
rt
> of the wiki.  We have resources to run testing here.  But I need a wiki t=
hat
> will work and will be well maintained, with cross backend code and non-la=
zy
> programming and documentation, particularly in the code.  This lack is
> probably limiting the development, debugging and maintainability of this
> project and it should be rectified.
>  </RANT>
--
Reini Urban
http://phpwiki.org