[pmwiki-devel] dataquery and ADOdb errors in general

[marc]

Ben Stallings said...
> Marc wrote,
> 
> > ADOdb has an inbuilt error handler.
> > Would it not be simpler to manage all db errors in one place?
> > And all that for all dbs in a dozen lines in adodb-errorhandler.inc.php 
> > and a single notify line.
> 
> Sounds great!

It is. Being able to exploit notify is a boon.

> Why not post a modified script (with a different 
> filename) to the Database Standard recipe page so we can try it out?

Done.

  http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/DatabaseStandard

> While you're at it, you could share the other improvements you've told 
> us about.

As I said, I'm out of that one. I hope folk eventually see the benefits 
of returning an object from ADOdbConnect(), but if not, then nothing is 
lost. As far as I'm concerned, to use db recipes, I only have to strip 
out the error handling code and tweak a few if statements. The downside 
- if you can call it that - is that I can't release any db recipes 
because they won't work with adodb-connect.php.

In any case, I've moved over to using the active record pattern - since 
I'm committed to OO - and that has simplified things still further, and 
works very well with PmWiki markup, imo. Failing once, I doubt I could 
convince folk of this method.

For example to support the following (find something in db on PmWiki 
page):

  (:displayobject object=Member value='userName like "%ben%"' :)

Only takes a few lines 

  function displayObject($opt) {
    global $ClassD;
    $defaults = array( 'object' => '', 'value' => '');
    $opt = array_merge($defaults, ParseArgs($opt));
    extract($opt);

    if (file_exists("$ClassD/Class.$object.php"))
      require_once "$ClassD/Class.$object.php";
    else
      return "No class definition '$object' for object.";
    # or create class defn dynamically via extend of AuxAR
    $inst = new $object();
    $loaded = $inst->load($value);
    if (! $loaded) return "no object found";
    return $inst->display();
}

Do this via a form and you have a db browser - in minutes. Note that the 
display() method is specific to the class, but it inherits a default 
that steps through via introspection (I ignore /^_/ vars and unpack 
arrays).

-- 
Cheers,
Marc