HCMC Blogs

I've now finished and tested the code for importing records into the db. The end result (which creates 438 primary title inserts, but thousands of ancillary records) was too large to run in a single operation, so I'm using <xsl:result-document> to split it into five sub-operations. Each one produces a detailed report on what it's done, so that, combined with the source XML file, should be all we need in terms of an audit trail.

It took a little longer than expected because of two additional aspects I hadn't planned for initially. Both the lenders and the owners tables have mechanisms for distinguishing between individuals and institutions, and I ended up adding some code to determine whether new records being added fell into one or the other category, by examining the name of the new owner or lender. In addition, I decided to parse out the forenames and surnames of individuals.

I would post the script here, but it's very long, very messy, based on invented XML in the source document, and it's a one-shot task that we won't have to do again, so it's not of any general use. However, the techniques I've figured out for this probably will be used again.

I haven't yet run it against the live database, only against the dev db; I don't want to make major changes right at the end of the day, so I'm going to do it tomorrow morning, after taking a fresh backup, and recording the upper bounds of the current db tables, so that I can report to J-SR and VG, and they can look at the results.

Created a new proposal for the HCMC committee, to make enhancements to the Adaptive DB code.

Created a thumbnail image for the title page of Maladies des Femmes.

After I successfully deployed the Lansdowne eXist app on Pear I had to make a minor change to controller-config.xml, after which I needed to stop and start the app. So, I attempted to do so in the Tomcat manager. Stopping the app worked, but upon pressing 'Start' Tomcat basically froze up, resulting in timeout errors for all Tomcat apps on pear.hcmc.uvic.ca:8081 . I submitted an urgent ticket and sysadmin restarted Tomcat within 20 minutes.

I've used the stop/start functionality before on pear (for Francotoile), so I'm not sure what happened here.

I've put the eXist version of the Lansdowne site, which is essentially a feature-complete prototype, on Pear:

http://pear.hcmc.uvic.ca:8081/lansdowne/site/index.xql

All is running well.

Leaving early.

Working with a single record, I've got the following stages done:

• Property identification or creation.
• Title creation.
• Owner identification or creation.
• Owner linking to title.
• Mortgage creation.
• Mortgage linking to title.

I'm now working on lenders. Once I have one record working, I'll start trying blocks of 5, 10, 20, 50, etc. till the whole thing works.

I've decided to go the PHP route for the moment. These two blocks of code would be run before and after running the PHP process, and I'm putting them here so I can get them when I need them. They only need to be run once, and I'll certainly be hacking away with my scripts for many hours in between.

    # Add the extra columns we need.
ALTER TABLE `props` ADD `temp_tracking` VARCHAR(1024);
ALTER TABLE `titles` ADD `temp_tracking` VARCHAR(1024);
ALTER TABLE `owners` ADD `temp_tracking` VARCHAR(1024);
ALTER TABLE `lenders` ADD `temp_tracking` VARCHAR(1024);
ALTER TABLE `mortgages` ADD `temp_tracking` VARCHAR(1024);
ALTER TABLE `other_docs` ADD `temp_tracking` VARCHAR(1024);
    
    # Delete the extra columns we added.
    
ALTER TABLE `props` DROP COLUMN `temp_tracking`;
ALTER TABLE `titles` DROP COLUMN `temp_tracking`;
ALTER TABLE `owners` DROP COLUMN `temp_tracking`;
ALTER TABLE `lenders` DROP COLUMN `temp_tracking`;
ALTER TABLE `mortgages` DROP COLUMN `temp_tracking`;
ALTER TABLE `other_docs` DROP COLUMN `temp_tracking`;

I've written the basic code to generate the SQL to add the core title table records, built in the PHP framework for running queries, and tested with a single record to demonstrate that it's practical. Now I can start building the more complicated queries.

At JW's request:

ALTER TABLE `revolt` ADD `rv_groupingDesc` varchar(2048) collate utf8_unicode_ci default NULL AFTER rv_grouping;

and in the local_classes.php file:

$this->addField(new MdhTextField('rv_groupingDesc', 'Grouping description', '', MAX_MED_TEXT, true));