Jonathan Hedstrom's blog

  • Writing SimpleTests for hook_file as part of the Media Code Sprint

    Jul 30, 2008

    Last Friday I met Aaron and drewish at the Ace hotel for a day of SimpleTest writing for the long-awaited hook_file() patch. This was part of the Portland Media/Files Code Sprint, organized by drewish to solidify the patch during the week of OSCON.

    The day was very productive, as file.inc went from having virtually no tests, to near complete test coverage. As is often the case when writing comprehensive unit tests, several inconsistencies with expected behavior/documentation were found and fixed.

    Aaron has provided an overview of the goals of the code sprint, and the remaining work to be done (both on the immediate patch, and beyond). But to summarize, the goal is better file (thus, media) handling in core.

    If you maintain or develop modules (or themes) in Drupal that need to deal with any sort of files, go give this patch a try (it's currently the spotlight patch).

    I've had a tremendous amount of fun writing tests for file.inc (hopefully I'll get to do a few more before the patch goes in), so I may very soon jump on some of the other needed tests for Drupal core.

  • CiviCRM deployment from host to host

    Jul 23, 2008

    While working on a CiviCRM site, I ran into a problem of migrating the installation from the development host to the QA, and from there to production. Since CiviCRM stores so much host-specific information in the database, every transfer needed to re-configure the host information. After much research and a little bit of pain, we discovered that the proper way to do this is to simply empty the config_backend field in the civicrm_domain table.

    So with this little bit of code tacked onto our deployment scripts:

    #Reconfigure the CiviCRM backend
echo 'UPDATE civicrm_domain SET config_backend = NULL WHERE id = 1;' \
| ssh $USER@$HOST "mysql -h $DB_HOST -u $DB_USER -p$DB_PASSWORD $DB_NAME2"

    deployments are once again flowing smoothly.

  • Programmatic node creation, Drupal 6 and the drupal_get_schema() function

    Jun 16, 2008

    While working on importing a bunch of content from an old Drupal site to a new one, I discovered a little gotcha with the D6 database schema functionality. The method I was using involved loading a bunch of nodes from the old database via a call to db_set_active(), followed by a series of calls to node_load(). Once I had the nodes in an array, I switch to the new db via another call to db_set_active and store the nodes via node_save().

    The problem arose due to the fact that Drupal is caching database schema information. Thus, during the node load phase, CCK attempts to load up information on a table that doesn't exist, and the result is cached. When back in the new database, where the table really does exist, the cached schema thinks it doesn't.

    The solution was to clear the database schema cache every time I switched back to a different database:

    function import_old_set_db($db = 'default') {
  db_set_active($db);
 
  // clear schema
  drupal_get_schema(NULL, TRUE);
}

    The key in the above function, which I used as a wrapper to db_set_active() in my import script, is the call to the drupal_get_schema() function, which clears the cached database schema information.

    This was a viable solution because this is a one-time import script where performance really isn't an issue. It would not be recommended for production sites when regularly switching between databases during normal page loads.