[Slashcode-development] Sections, Anchor.pm and SlashSectionHost

[shane <sh...@lo...>]

I'm trying to determine where the "appropriate" place is to determine a 
user's current section, and I'm getting confused:

in the current slash series:

If I look at $user->{currentSection}, it is set when header() is called.

  the line is:  $user->{currentSection} = $section || '';
  where section was passed to header().

in the devel slash series:

there's the SlashSectionHost call that will hard-wire the section because 
of the URL. It sets

  $new_cfg->{defaultsection} = $section;

and Anchor.pm still has  $user->{currentSection} = $section || '';
   where section was *passed* to header().



Which leads me to think that getting $user->{currentSection} is *always* up 
to the perl script running at the time to get the section set correctly. So 
I cannot do the following:


sub main {
     my $constants = getCurrentStatic();
     my $slashdb   = getCurrentDB();
     my $user      = getCurrentUser();

and expect that $user->{currentSection}, at this point in time, is correct.

Only after calling header() in the script will $user->{currentSection}
be correct.



Am I understanding this correctly? Or what did I miss?

What I am looking for is the correct way to obtain what section a user is 
in (so as to display the correct section-related data in a calendar for them).

I had always thought this was easy - check the $form data for
$form->{section}, look it up with $slashdb->getSection(),
check the return for validity and you're set.

But with the new Apache directive (which is very cool, btw) it would seem 
to me that $user->{currentSection} should immediately be populated with 
that section that the user's in, if they're in a section.sitename.blah

And it also seems that any script that needs to know the current section 
(ie index.pl) would have to do something like

         my $section;
         if ($form->{section}) {
                 $section = $slashdb->getSection($form->{section});
         } else {
                 $section->{section} = $constants->{defaultsection};
         }

instead of


         my $section;
         if ($form->{section}) {
                 $section = $slashdb->getSection($form->{section});
         } else {
                 $section->{section} = 'index';
                 $section->{issue} = 1;
         }

while other scripts just do:

  header("$constants->{sitename}", $form->{section});

and don't bother to lookup what's being passed to them via the form.

I couldn't test the devel setup with the newer Apache directive, I've got 
no box that I can run slash>2.2.5 on at this time. (though I did try 
something like http://apache.slashdot.org/?section=features and it listed 
as it should)
so I think I'm missing something...

please help!

  Shane