November 2007 - Development - lists.drupal.org

custom search form
by Alessandro Feijó 06 Nov '07

06 Nov '07

I'm trying to build a form to search The intro page shows the search form, and bellow, a grid When the user set some fields, and click OK, the grid must show the filtered result There is any node in drupal.org about it? I'm fighting with some weird problems, like after click OK, the hole browser shows nothing, blank! I figured out that the drupal_get_form() from my _form function cause that problem, if I just show the grid (no search form), the blank problem do not hepend. TIA for any tip Thanks Feijó

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Want eternal glory?
by Karoly Negyesi 06 Nov '07

06 Nov '07

Hi, We are fixing some old, old issues this cycle -- like the new link to comments and now db locks. But there is an issue that's older beyond imaging. Eternal glory awaits who fixes http://drupal.org/node/8 . In http://drupal.org/node/8#comment-287088 you can read a summary of the problems. Technically it's not a difficult patch, but the issue will be *six years old* in a month. Be careful with wording, warn user administrators of possible legal problems and so on. So, who's taking it?

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Coder - It's a Community Tool
by Doug Green 06 Nov '07

06 Nov '07

I started this email to make one point, which is, at the end of this email, but it occurred to me that there are more important coder issues to bring up. 1. I'm seeking a co-maintainer for the coder module. You should have some Drupal credentials... 2. Help define the future of coder? - I've been asked to run some rules on cvs ci - good idea/bad idea? - should coder be an authoritative tool verses a helper tool (i.e., prevent code checkins on certain types of failures) - other ideas (... hopefully your idea comes with coding keyboard ;) 3. A developer recently suggested that they would change their module just to remove a coder warning, even though they knew the warning to be bogus. IMO, this is a mistake. You are smarter than coder. Coder is just a tool to help you. It flags potential problems and points you to the documentation. It's up to you to decide if there's really a problem. If it's a security related issue, you should look at it very closely and be absolutely certain before you ignore the warning, but the decision is still yours. Please don't change your code just to get rid of a coder warning. -- Doug Green douggreen(a)douggreenconsulting.com 904-583-3342 Bringing Ideas to Life with Software Artistry and Invention...

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Re: [development] Converting floats stored in scientific notation back to decimals
by Karen Stevenson 06 Nov '07

06 Nov '07

There's no telling what kind of info is stored there now, it could be decimals of various kinds and also integers, and some of the larger numbers are stored in scientific notation. My plan was to provide both a float and a real decimal field, but since we previously called the float field 'decimal', there undoubtedly are people out there who have decimal data stored in it that field they will want moved to the new decimal field, so I wanted to provide a migration path. I never intended to blindly convert everything, just provide a way to do it for people who really do want that info in a decimal field. It sounds like this is going to get too complicated to do right now, and no one is stepping up to do it, so I will probably just add a new field type and rename the old one but do nothing about conversion. I'm not sure about the idea of storing decimal data as integers instead. That makes it more complicated since the data will need more manipulation during input and display, while just adding a regular decimal field as another option in the number module would be very simple. Karen ----- Original Message ---- I'd love to have both float and decimal fields provided by CCK. I.e. decimal fields could be renamed to float and a new decimal field could be added. > > Since we are talking about updating/converting existing data, a > question is what people could have possibly stored there. Just money? > (and what currency?) Scientific measurements? Percentages and ratios? > (and what precision did they expect?) Hence my reservations about > storing fixed-point numbers. >

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custom form elements
by domas 06 Nov '07

06 Nov '07

Hi, I need to let users submit locations in a form (using googlemaps) and I was thinking if it is possible to define custom form fields for formapi? Like $map = array('#type' => 'map', '#default_value' => 'xxx yyy', '#title' => 'your location') and have this show up as a map in the form. Is it possible to do this? How should this be done? Thanks, Domas

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Module AdminRSS
by FGM 06 Nov '07

06 Nov '07

Hello, For several months now, it appears this module has been left unmaintained, with myself being the sole patch provider. I've tried to contact the maintainer (webgeer) from d.o. and on his own site, without an answer. Webgeer, if you are reading this list, could you answer me ? Otherwise, I would like to have it considered to add me as a maintainer of this project so I can at least create the needed branches and commit long-waiting patches. Frederic

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Re: [development] Converting floats stored in scientific notation back to decimals
by Karen Stevenson 05 Nov '07

05 Nov '07

<snip> Are you going to use something big, such as decimal(64,32)? Or are you looking for a conversion which preserves the most significant digits up to some point? How many decimal digits do you have in mind? Perhaps I don't understand this correctly, but storing the values as decimals looks like trouble to me. </snip> Changing from a float column to a decimal column is an issue that was very important to a lot of people and I'm trying to make that happen. I am assuming that a decimal field with two decimals would be the type of column people would expect for the CCK decimal field, but I don't know for sure what size or precision would be best. Anyway, what I'm really trying to do is find a volunteer familiar with and interested in getting a real decimal field in CCK who can figure out what is needed and create a patch for this. I'm trying to get the D6 port done and don't have time to do it. If I do spend time doing it, it will delay getting CCK ported to 6x. Thanks! Karen

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Converting floats stored in scientific notation back to decimals
by Karen Stevenson 05 Nov '07

05 Nov '07

I'm working on the CCK D6 port and I need help coming up with the SQL to convert floats stored in scientific notation back to decimals. Up to now, CCK has used a float field to store the 'decimal' field type, which works fine if the numbers are not too large, but ends up stored in scientific notation if they are. This has been a known CCK problem for a long time but fixing it before now would have involved re-writing some of the most complex code in CCK, so it hasn't gotten done. In D6 we now have a real decimal field to use, which is great, but I need to write an D6 update that will take the data sometimes stored in scientific notation and sometimes as decimal values in those float fields, and migrate it to decimal fields without losing any data, and I badly need help finding the right SQL to do this update. You can easily create a test bed by creating a table with a float field and a decimal field. Then store some small and some very large integers and decimals, in the float field and try to copy those stored values from the float field back to the decimal field without losing or corrupting any data. And of course we have to do it in a way that works in both MYSQL and Postgres :) Thanks! Karen

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$_REQUEST/$_COOKIE scope in URLs?
by J-P Stacey 05 Nov '07

05 Nov '07

Hi, I've come across a couple of places where the $_REQUEST and $_COOKIE scopes are serialized and appended onto URLs: specifically in pager_get_querystring() and tablesort_get_querystring(). I was wondering: what's the rationale behind doing this? The only use I've worked out for putting cookies on the URL is when you're migrating session data across domains. They're the last thing I'd expect to start appearing in paging URLs: those just need the current-page URL with modified offset and count parameters of some sort. It strikes me as odd behaviour: $_REQUEST is request-specific storage, not to be passed onto the next request. And sometimes cookies are a dumping-ground for vast amounts of session data (and might even contain cookies from non-PHP applications on the same domain). Besides, the browser ought to be already keeping track of the cookie scope through HTTP headers. (It's also given me problems personally, as I sometimes use the $_REQUEST scope as a convenient dumping-ground for data: possibly I should be using $GLOBALS, but that's a whole other argument.) Any thoughts? Cheers, J-P -- J-P Stacey +44 (0)1608 811870 http://torchbox.com

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marketing preparation for Drupal 6
by Gábor Hojtsy 05 Nov '07

05 Nov '07

Hey, I am thinking about how best can we push Drupal 6 out with better marketing material then ever, and I think we have two interesting directions to take which are both doable with some effort. 1. Video demonstrations of features (not just the brand new stuff, but concentrated on the brand new stuff). Time commenting on videos could boost their usefulness a huge deal. Look at http://www.viddler.com/ for inspiration on how time based commenting can enhance videos. Or look at http://itp.nyu.edu/research/?page_id=34 for a Wordpress plugin which works with Quicktime videos and is probably portable with some effort. So putting in "community plumbing" to our videos would be great. This could even work nicely as a drop-in for Drupal Dojo videos. 2. Features sheet / brochure. You know how the big players do it: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/features.html or http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/ Short summaries, nice pictures, some detailed explanation with videos if possible. So far in my practice, it showed that a major hard part in producing screencasts is writing up the flow (also known as script) the demonstrator goes through. But this can be written collaboratively even by people with not as good screencast capabilities. Let's see what we can do to push Drupal 6 when it comes around. (But beware, don't rush with your videos (but do with your video scripts), the interface is still changing for the better). Gabor

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