Re: [Refdb-devel] refdb db in menu?

[Markus H. <mar...@mh...>]

Michael Smith writes:
 > hmm, I realize now that naming the base db "refdb" is arbitrary. I guess
 > a user could choose during install to call the base database "mybasedb"
 > or whatever, and then could create another database called "refdb", and
 > have references added to that.
 > 

No, the name is not arbitrary. It is hard-coded in the main header
file. The name changes once in a while if I change the database schema
and want to allow users to run parallel installations of RefDB using
the old and the new schemas at the same time.

 > Or to make it more configurable, we could add refdb-listdb-ignore-list
 > variable, again with default value "refdb", but make it a list. Users
 > could put multiple names into it that way, and then wouldn't need to
 > mess around with trying to figure out how to construct a regex and
 > express it in whatever syntax their backend database supported.
 > 
 > And that way, we could also include the built-in database names for the
 > backends -- i.e. Postgres's "template0" and "template1" databases, and
 > whatever the names are of the built-in databases that MySQL sets up.
 > 

The latter is "mysql" (who would have guessed that?).

 > How does that sound?
 > 

I think it may be useful in quite a couple of cases, so I'd suggest to
add such a list. This black list together with the regexp that allows
to define a white list should be sufficient to pick the right
databases.

 > Now that I write all that, though, I wonder whether that logic might not
 > be better handled on the RefDB side -- so that refdbd -C listdb wouldn't
 > return the name of the base RefDB database, whatever its name, or of the
 > built-in backend database names.
 > 

I could do this of course, but it is still a half-assed solution as it
does not solve the problem of non-RefDB databases served by the same
database engine. A real solution would require refdbd to test each
database returned by listdb whether or not it is a RefDB database,
e.g. by running a query that retrieves values of all fields listed by
their names. This would also filter out databases that the user has no
permission to access anyway. Should I put this on my todo list?

regards,
Markus

-- 
Markus Hoenicka
mar...@ca...
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