Adaptive Database

I have the link checker requested by AC coded up and working, and it's been tested in the VPN, Manifest and Trials dbs (tested in dev, then rolled out to live). I will also roll it out to JSRDocs when I get a chance (there's no dev there, so I always do that one last), and possible Properties (although there are no links in that DB AFAIK).

I have a working link-checker for FLD_LINK and FLD_LINKSET fields throughout the database, which uses CURL to check links and reports when they fail. There is still some work to do on this, because I'm not yet correctly escaping characters such as apostrophes which should never turn up in filenames or folder names, but which do regularly turn up because users love to ignore instructions. I'll have to decide whether I should report these as errors even though the links work (on the basis that the names are likely to cause problems down the road), in which case I should also add regex checking to the input fields on the page, or whether I should just escape the characters so that CURL can handle them, and give up on trying to badger people into using sensible filenames.

This feature was requested for VPN, but will also be useful for JW's projects.

The table returned from record deletion was embellished with the old column-header filter fields. I've now got rid of those, since they're obsolete. PUshed out the fix to all current live projects.

Updated the VPN, Properties, Trials, Manifest, and JSRDocs database projects with the new codebase changes.

Right now the project_variables_SAMPLE.php file, which is copied to create a working file, contains a hard-coded set of instructions for the db. These should be linked via an include somehow, because as the db code develops, the instructions change, and the ones in project files get out of date and have to be updated manually.

As part of the VPN project, phase one (agreed by the HCMC Committee), I've enhanced the Adaptive DB codebase with a couple of new features:

• You can now search for a comma-separated list of integers in an integer field (so you can retrieve a specific known set of records by their ids, for instance).
• Input from the search form is much better sanitized than before.
• The search wildcard character has been switched from the SQL % to the more familiar asterisk (*), and backslash-escaping of the wildcard now allows you to search for it as a literal character.
• Help pages and popup help buttons have been enhanced.

This development was done on the VPN dev db, and will be rolled out to the live version for full testing, before being rolled out to other dbs.