Two Drifters

How does the installation of a db.xml file in the package root directory work?

I need to create tables for my Dashboard Application (Import Wizard), which will not be used by blocks – the Import Wizard does not contain any blocks.

In the Concrete5 forum, a function installDB was mentioned. It's defined in the InstallController class like this:

protected function installDB() {

$installDirectory = $this->installData['DIR_BASE_CORE'] . '/config';
$file = $installDirectory . '/db.xml';
if (!file_exists($file)) {
throw new Exception(t('Unable to locate database import file.'));
}

$db = Loader::db();
$db->ensureEncoding();
$err = Package::installDB($file);

}

It ensures the db.xml file exists and after some other setup steps and check finally calls Package::installDB (Package is a model):

public static function installDB($xmlFile) {

if (!file_exists($xmlFile)) {
return false;
}

// currently this is just done from xml

$db = Loader::db();

// this sucks – but adodb generates errors at the beginning because it attempts
// to find a table that doesn't exist!

$handler = $db->IgnoreErrors();
if ($db->getDebug() == false) {
ob_start();
}

$schema = $db->getADOSChema();
$sql = $schema->ParseSchema($xmlFile);

$db->IgnoreErrors($handler);

if (!$sql) {
$result->message = $db->ErrorMsg();
return $result;
}

$r = $schema->ExecuteSchema();

if ($db->getDebug() == false) {
$dbLayerErrorMessage = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();
}

$result = new stdClass;
$result->result = false;

if ($dbLayerErrorMessage != ") {
$result->message = $dbLayerErrorMessage;
return $result;
} if (!$r) {
$result->message = $db->ErrorMsg();
return $result;
}

$result->result = true;

$db->CacheFlush();
return $result;

}

The Code is Copyright by Concrete5 Team.

It looks like I could just drop a db.xml file in my package directory and it will be installed. But how should I name my table?

By convention, there's different prefixes:

• atX (atAddress, atBoolean, atDateTime) = attribute types
• btX (btForm, btFlashContent, btSearch) = block types

But there's none for helper tables, to be used just for the Dashboard wizard.

Here's a link to the AdoDB XML Schemas (AXMLS) (the language db.xml is written in). I came up with the following:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<schema version="0.3">
<table name="IdImportWizardSources">
<field name="ID" type="I">
<key />
<unsigned />
<autoincrement />
</field>
<field name="source" type="X" />
<field name="retrieved" type="T">
<deftimestamp />
</field>
<field name="content" type="B" />

</table>
</schema>

Here I define a new table named IdImportWizardSources (Id for IdeaDay), and several field values using keywords.

Notable is the retrieved field which is automatically set to the current timestamp (deftimestamp). content has a type of BLOB which should be able to store up to 4 GB with MySQL longblob type – unfortunately the amount you can store at once also depends on your MySQL max_packet_size. (Which is usually set to around 16 MB).

The table is imported and set up automatically by Concrete, without a single line o'code.