Re: [Refdb-users] cannot add records!

[Matt P. <mat...@ut...>]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2004 at 09:16:41PM +0100, Markus Hoenicka wrote: 

> I think I've mentioned it previously, but I wouldn't access the
> database directly from your PHP code. In order to make best use of the
> data you'd have to implement a lot of wacky SQL queries which are now
> nicely encapsulated in refdbd. Instead you should use the Perl client
> library, if possible (can PHP do this?), or call the command-line
> clients from your PHP code via system(). The Emacs front-end does the
> latter btw and works quite well.

weeeellll...  I guess I can just get the info via getref etc.  The
reason I had thought to query directly from php was simply that the
scripts my friend has written make beautiful html for a wide variety
of reference types already; I was hoping to get away with minimal
modification.  But the structure of the refdb database IS pretty
complex, and I guess the SQL wouldn't be all that easy to write.  

so, I will take another look at the getref docs and see what kind of
formats it can write to.  hopefully it will be pretty easy to pass its
output back to php as an array... or I'll see about referencing the
perclient stuff from php.  I think I would just need to write a little
perl script that accepts an array, passes it to refdb, then grabs
something else back...  shouldn't be impossible, anyway.

speaking of the Emacs front-end -- do you mean refdb-mode?  I haven't
for the life of me been able to get it to work, is it compatible with
0.9.3-pre3?  I keep thinking I'm missing something in the 'customize'
window, but can't figure out what it is.  whenever I try to 'getref'
on my database, I get the error 'could not connect to database
server'...  and I can't find any documentation on refdb-mode.  Do you
have any advice?

Anywy, thanks,

matt

> 
> regards,
> Markus
>