HCMC Blogs

Here is where we sit for the moment:

I have to have a last file-by-file pass at the 1859 files to scan for missed people, place, vessel, and mentions of Indigenous People. Much of this has already been done with find/replace, for example, with the common names and places, but I need to do a final pass to catch the stragglers.

Theo continues to add place-name tags to files from the 1858 collection, as this was missed in the last round. This is a welcome change for the poor man, as I had him parsing images for eons. I suspect that by the time his time with us is completed (as an RA), he will have completed this task, perhaps more.

Shaun has turned to the writing of abstracts, picking up where we had left off: 1852. As he is here as part of a Directed Reading, through the work of Susan Doyle in the Pro. Writing Department, he will be leaving us when his semester ends, around the first week of April.

I have completed the date tags for 1859. There may be the odd one missing, but I will catch them when I scan through each file for new place, people, and vessel names.

In textarea elements produced by my db_fields.php code, I used to insert a space inside the tag, with this explanation: "Add a space to keep the tag from self-closing. We'll trim this on submission."

This space was obviously showing up in the text boxes for the user, which is a little annoying, so I've experimented with turning it off (for MdhTextField and MdhLinkSetField). I can't detect any problems -- the tag is written out by PHP as a regular tag, not a self-closing one, so I'm not sure whether something has changed in the PHP version, or whether perhaps I wrote this code as part of my original home project, running on my mholmes.com account, where a different version of PHP was converting all empty tags to self-closing when serializing the HTML. In any case, I've removed the extra space, and as far as I can tell there are no instances of self-closing tags as a result. Keeping a watching brief, though, just in case.

We've had at least two occasions on which the data in the doc_to_docPeriod_id field was set to null unexpectedly. Today I finally figured out when it happens, which in turn enabled me to figure out how (with help from JN). It was triggered when I ran my script for copying the live data into the backup database. There was nothing in the script which did anything to explicitly delete data in the live db, though, so I was mystified, until JN suggested a trigger in one of the tables operating on the other. When I looked at the live db, I found there was indeed a foreign key which was pointing at the other database, by mistake. When the docPeriods table was truncated in the dev db, all the corresponding the live db was set to null. Doh!

Changed the existing doc_to_period_id relationship into a one-to-many field. These were the steps:

• Create a docs_to_docPeriods table:

  --
  -- Table structure for table `docs_to_docPeriods`
  --
  
  CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `docs_to_docPeriods` (
    `dtp_dtp_id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
    `dtp_doc_id_fk` int(11) NOT NULL,
    `dtp_docPeriod_id_fk` int(11) NOT NULL,
    PRIMARY KEY  (`dtp_dtp_id`),
    KEY `dtp_docPeriod_id_fk_idx` (`dtp_docPeriod_id_fk`),
    KEY `dtp_doc_id_fk_idx` (`dtp_doc_id_fk`)
  ) ENGINE=InnoDB  DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;
  

• Add constraints to it:

  --
  -- Constraints for table `docs_to_docPeriods`
  --
  ALTER TABLE `docs_to_docPeriods`
    ADD CONSTRAINT `docs_to_docPeriods_ibfk_1` FOREIGN KEY (`dtp_doc_id_fk`) REFERENCES `documents` (`doc_id`) ON DELETE CASCADE ON UPDATE CASCADE,
    ADD CONSTRAINT `docs_to_docPeriods_ibfk_2` FOREIGN KEY (`dtp_docPeriod_id_fk`) REFERENCES `docPeriods` (`dp_id`) ON DELETE CASCADE ON UPDATE CASCADE;
  
  

• Copy the existing data over to it:

  INSERT INTO `docs_to_docPeriods` (`dtp_doc_id_fk`, `dtp_docPeriod_id_fk`) SELECT `doc_id`, `doc_to_docPeriods_id` FROM `documents`
  

• Add the support for this in local_classes.php:

  $this->addField(new MdhOneToManyField('doc_periods', 'Period(s)',
                                  'doc_id', 
                                  'disPeriods',
                                  'dp_id',
                                  'dp_name',
                                  'docs_to_docPeriods',
                                  'dtp_dtp_id',
                                  'dtp_doc_id_fk',
                                  'dtp_docPeriod_id_fk',
                                  true, 'dp_name', true));
        

• Comment out the original field (we'll leave the data in there for a while, just in case).
• Test on dev db, then migrate to live.

Met with SK to draft a project proposal for the HCMC committee, and then drafted the proposal; still waiting for feedback from SK and TH, and a copy of their grant application, which should be done by Monday.

Incidentally, in the process of writing the proposal, we tested the Hulq site on my Android phone, where it worked fine (although it could benefit from some friendly stylesheets to eliminate wasted space and leave more room for content). But testing on JN's iPhone, the audio failed because it seems not to support Flash or Quicktime (at least QT with AIF files, which is what we're offering).

While writing the function to grab an 'excerpt' of text from an utterance (i.e. a chunk of text surrounding a search term), I discovered that substr_replace() is not multibyte-safe. So, if you use it with a multibyte string you might get strange results.

The excerpt() function, which is otherwise very solid and flexible, is adapted from CakePHP's text helper. I had to replace these two lines:

$excerpt = substr_replace($excerpt, $ending, 0, $phraseLen);

$excerpt = substr_replace($excerpt, $ending, -$phraseLen);

With these multibyte-safe lines:

$excerpt = mb_substr($excerpt, 0, 0) . $ending . mb_substr($excerpt, $phraseLen + 1);

$excerpt = mb_substr($excerpt, 0, -$phraseLen) . $ending . mb_substr($excerpt, $textLen);

So, in a nutshell, here's how to convert your substr_replace() call to a multibyte version:

// Original call
$string = substr_replace($text, $replacement, $start, $length);

// MB-safe call
$string = mb_substr($text, 0, $start) . $replacement . mb_substr($text, $length);

Made several fixes to Greek exercises based on user bug reports, confirmed by LB.

In History class.

Presentation on databases to Hist 516 class.