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

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

On 10/4/05, John Stevens <jst...@gm...> wrote:
> On 10/3/05, Reini Urban <rei...@gm...> wrote:
> > Interesting. Never heard of a system where setlocale("C") fails.
> > Please post details to the phpwiki bug tracker. C is the mother of all
> locales.
>
>  I'll send this to the bugtracker later, but for now, here are the detail=
s
> of the error we see.
>  Fatal Error: lib/FileFinder.php (In template 'body' < 'htmldump'):191:
> Error: locale/C/LC_MESSAGES/phpwiki.php: ????????????
>
>  Not exatly a helpful message.  It is looking for the file
> [wikihome]locale/C/LC_MESSAGES/phpwiki.php.  Problem is
> there is no locale/C or any subdirectories, either on my machine or in th=
e
> 1.3.11p1 archive.

This is a useful error message. Thanks. I'll fix it ASAP.

> > If you dig into the sources, you will see that those TRUE statements (a=
lso
> 1=3D1)
> > come from the search library, which is a pretty good library IMHO.
>
>  I must disagree with this assessment.  There should be no reason to do a
> TRUE statement like 1 or 1=3D1 or NULL=3DNULL in any SQL.  It is simply a=
 way of
> preformatting a WHERE clause so you can just keep tacking AND condition
> statments to it, if there is a reason to.  It is lazy programming.  You
> should only create a WHERE clause if there are conditions that you need t=
o
> limit a query to.  If you dont, then SELECT column1,column2 FROM tablex; =
is
> all you need.  Not SELECT column1,column2 FROM tablex WHERE 1=3D1;
> That is just lazy programming.

Well, I wouldn't disqualifying the search library as lazy, more as
overkill. Unfortunately we need such a beast.
It's a search string string expression parser and compiler. It
compiles to either pcre expressions or SQL statements. On the SQL side
dependend on the backend supported syntax.
In style similar to a perl (not-yet existing) SQL::Search library
which would use the great SQL::Abstract.
The problem you have is with the optimizer step, which folds TRUE to
1=3D1 and doesn't eliminate unnecessary statements.
We thought that this is not necessary since the SQL parser eliminates
these in his side. I didn't think of oracle, since I couldn't test it
(yet).
("Premature optimization is evil")
BTW: Now I do have oracle, but didn't set it up yet.

> > You miss coding documentation? I cannot agree.
>
>  I am willing to be proven wrong ;)  Can you point me in a direction to f=
ind
> it?  Thanks.  Comments in the code are insufficient for someone not
> intimately invovled in the development to get a rapid handle on how it al=
l
> hangs together.

Others can easily follow. Rapid involvement is not easy, but there are
lot of people who can write plugins or contribute to various parts,
based on the code and comments.

> > I would agree that you miss updated user documentation for such feature=
s.
>
>  Is there are place I can find this also?

http://phpwiki.org/ should be the central place, besides the basic
docs in pgsrc/

> Any advice on how to make the dump to XHTML exclude unwanted pages etc?

exclude=3D<commasep-pagename-list> is a standard argument for all
actions and plugins using pagelists.

e.g. ?action=3Ddumphtml&exclude=3DNotThese/*,*Private
action=3Ddumphtml also accepts pages=3D[] to dump only a set of certain pag=
es.

--
Reini Urban