[support] Issues with initializing Variables on startup..

[Metzler, David]

I think you're confusing two completely independent constructs.  

 

Variable_get and variable_set are used to store system wide settings
that should persist in the database.  They are never (to my knowledge)
instantiated as PHP variables. The caching structure is meant to reduce
the number of database hits involved in loading variables, and should
not generally be accessed directly.  Multiple calls to variable_get
should leverage the cached variables as appropriate. 

 

The variables in settings.php can be used, you can define your own
global variables there, but if you want them to persist between page
loads you need to do that yourself.  IN your hooks you can reference
these variables after defining them as globals, but be careful with
namespace collisions.  I usually create a global variable that has the
same name as my module and store everying inside it (as an associative
array).  

 

Finally session variables can be used and will persist in the database
for the duration of a session.  


Hope that clarifies things.  It sounds like drupal is behaving as
designed here. 

 

Dave

 

________________________________

From: support-bounces at drupal.org [mailto:support-bounces at drupal.org] On
Behalf Of Scott Matthews
Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2008 7:37 AM
To: support at drupal.org
Cc: Ron Trevarrow
Subject: [support] Issues with initializing Variables on startup..

 

I found what Appears to be a bug (or two) with initializing variables in
Drupal.

 

It is suggested that you can uncomment and set initial variable values
in settings.php with the $conf array.  In doing so, and not seeing my
variables set when retrieving using variable_get, I discovered that
conf_init(), when called to initialize the configure file path, it sets
$conf to a string.  I know that since it initializes settings.php within
the context it conceptually SHOULD reset it to a variable, but it
doesn't.   I proved this by changing the variable array name in
settings.php, variable_get, variable_set, variable_init and conf_init to
$config_vars and the values I initialized in settings.php were reflected
when my application later retrieved them using variable_get.

 

This bug is currently hindering the flexibility of an application that
I'm writing that will be deployed to different environments.  I
initially tried to set the variables in the 'variable' table of the
Database in order to retrieve them with variable_get but that method
only accesses the cached variables in $conf (or in my case,
$config_vars.  Is this on purpose?  I see that variable_set will not
only set the cached variable but will also set into the database.  This
seems to be a bug as well to me.  Can someone clarify this for me?

 

Scott Matthews

 






 

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