[Rlib-users] debugging php rlib & other thoughts

[John B. <jo...@ma...>]

I have rlib working on my linux system, with the C code, but not with 
PHP.  

I tried the PHP example, and also mimicking my working C code in PHP, 
namely like this:

<?
error_reporting(E_ALL);
dl ("libr.so");
$r = rlib_init();
rlib_add_datasource_mysql($r, "local_mysql", "localhost", "root", 
"xxxxx", "magnatune");
rlib_add_query_as($r, "local_mysql", "select * from visa;", "example");
rlib_add_report($r, "report.xml", "example");
rlib_set_output_format($r, "html");
rlib_execute($r);
rlib_finalize($r);
header(rlib_get_content_type($r));
rlib_spool($r);
?>

the trouble is that if I run up to rlib_execute the page displays 
nothing, and apache's errorlog shows a few pid's exiting.   I'm not 
sure how to debug this any further. I know the library's loading, 
because if I pass invalid params to, say, rlib_add_report, I get a 
helpful error.

--

you'll not that:
rlib_add_query_as($r, "local_mysql", "select * from visa;", "example");

takes 4 params, not 3 as documented.

--

it would be *very* helpful to have a reports.xml included in the 
distribution. Copying/pasting from the PDF loses the tab indentation, 
but more seriously, all single quotes are turned into "smart quotes" 
which cause XML parser errors.

--

it would be very handy to be able to give a filename to rlib_spool(r) 
and have the output written there. That would let me have a big C 
program which generated all my reports in one program, without needing 
to repeatedly run a C program and shell out.

---

Any interest in Tcl bindings?  It happens to be my language of choice 
(though I do use PHP and Perl a lot too).  I can probably make them 
fairly easily.

--

can you provide an XML example of report breaks ?  I can probably hack 
at them for a few hours and make them work, but an example would be 
great (just paste the section into an email response)

---

FYI, the C code is very clean, which is a nice suprise, and really 
helped me understand how this worked.

-john