[pmwiki-users] Core and question marks

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Mon Aug 28 16:56:46 CDT 2006


On Mon, Aug 28, 2006, Martin Fick wrote:
> --- "Patrick R. Michaud" <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
> > A downside of using tags or attributes on wikipages 
> > to indicate virtual groups is that every call to
> > PageExists()
> > for non-existent page would then have to read and
> > process the GroupAttributes and/or GroupHeader
> > page of the group, which could get expensive.  
> 
> Yes, it is indeed some overhead, but since it is for
> non-existing pages only it might not matter to anyone?
>  I'd be much more concerned if it were on the page
> exists path!
> [...]
> If it were simly an attribute but the caching
> mechanism were simply a hidden file with the name of
> the group, i.e:  .Virtual   then your lookup would
> still just be a simple filesystem check and would not
> consume any memory.  Just a thought...

Well, my current thinking is that I may add it for now 
as an admin-only option (via a $VirtualNamesPattern
variable), and we can always add the capability to make
it available to authors a bit later.

Part of me really wonders what this will do to (:pagelist:).
For example, (:pagelist group=Category:) probably still
won't find all of the "virtual" pages in the Category
group, even though PageExists() will claim they exist.

This probably goes back to the missing/orphaned/existing/all
option for (:pagelist:) and friends, so that we would 
want to have a way to display "virtual" pages as well
(where we find out their existence via the .pageindex).

Anyway, I'll probably put together a prototype of a revised
PageExists() and run it on pmwiki.org and we can see what
happens.  :-)

Pm




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