HCMC Blogs

Worked 3.5 hours

PostgreSQL (psql) has several xml output methods.

For example, to dump a table to an XML file:

# /usr/pgsql-9.6/bin/psql -v ON_ERROR_STOP=1 -d name_of_db
name_of_db=# COPY (SELECT table_to_xml('name_of_schema.name_of_table', true, false, '')) to '/path/to/backup.xml'

There are two problems with using XML outputs:
1) The XML is pretty basic
2) Because of the way PostgreSQL works the whole transaction is done at once so memory allocation on large tables will kill the process (or the server) and you end up with messages like this:

server closed the connection unexpectedly
This probably means the server terminated abnormally
before or while processing the request.
The connection to the server was lost. Attempting reset: Failed.

The advice from sysadmin is don't use XML output for big things.

Worked 2.5 hours

Worked 2 hours

I'm currently engaged in a very long and gnarly process to fix lots of encoding errors and oddities which are only now being revealed in the source XML, mostly because they give rise to invalid HTML5 in the output. I'm down to a small number of errors, but there are still some issues to be fixed which will take significant time. However, the basic rendering of despatch pages is working, and before the end of this week I hope to be able to get the build process to the point where I can add HTML validation to the Jenkins job and have it pass. The time required for the build process should also have dropped considerably as of today, because I've refactored a bit and I'm making use of the already-rendered AJAX fragments rather than re-rendering the same entity descriptions multiple times. Dozens of hours on this in the last few weeks.

Worked 1 hour.

Worked 1.5 hours

Working on a thorny hierarchy-unwrapping problem with the Despatches site.

I've now finished converting all the original templates from the Cocoon app into modern XSLT 3, with the exception of the stuff relating to the image browser and similar special pages. There are still some page-level modules that need to be done, such as rendering the abstracts and the correspondence headers, but we're close. The output is a long way from valid, though, so I'm now going through the process of debugging and fixing things like nested links. 480 minutes, today and yesterday.

worked 3 hours

note to self, checked links, go over again to see if context is correct.