Forum OpenACS Development: Re: approach to refactoring ACS Mail Lite

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Posted by Iuri Sampaio on
Ben,

Neither assigning a static value for package_id, nor creating a whole new package, with a new parameter worked fine. I ran the tests in the acs-developer shell

Example: parameter::get_from_package_key -package_key "evex-users" -parameter "ExternalWebsiteURL"

Both ad_procs [parameter::get] or [parameter::get_from_package_key] return blank (i.e. "") as value.

p.s. Parameter's accessible through APM -> (evex-users) pkg admin -> parameters

Best wishes,
Iuri

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Posted by Benjamin Brink on
Hi Iuri,

Sounds like a gremlin in the system!

Surely it's time to fill those procs with ns_log Debug comments.. and set Dev or Debug to on in /admin/nsstats.tcl

Maybe issue is temporal, taking a few minutes after restart to complete background processes?

Anyway, certainly worth investigating.
best wishes,
Ben

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Posted by Gustaf Neumann on
There is nothing wrong with the ad_procs ::get and get_from_package_key, there are used all over the system. If these functions would be broken, we would have big troubles. When someone adds a new parameter to an existing package, it is not sufficient to update the .info file via the package manager, but one has to increment the version number of the package to be able to run an upgrade; In the upgrade step, the parameters are actually added to the database. Providing a non-default value to this new parameter can be done after running the upgrade generically via the web-interface in /admin/site-map.

Note that parameter::get_from_package_key is supposed to work only for singleton packages. New packages should use global parameters instead (see [1]).

Hope this helps
-gn

[1] https://openacs.org/api-doc/proc-view?proc=parameter::get_from_package_key&source_p=1

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Posted by Iuri Sampaio on
Thanks Gustaf,

I've done all that. I believe the problem exists because, instead of writing it directly within the file .info, I'd created the parameter through the interface (APM). Afterwards, I confirmed that the parameter was automatically generate within .info, then increased manually the version number and restarted NS, but unfortunately ad_procs still persist returning "".

My package isn't singleton, but I did use global scope.

parameter scope="global" datatype="string" min_n_values="1" max_n_values="1" name="CodeIgniterWebsiteUrl" default="http://dev.evex.co"; description="Website URL for Venues & Services CMS in CodeIgniter"/

I'll debug this problem over the weekend and let you .

Getting back to the subject of refactoring ACS Mail Lite, I can help to do the job. Let me know if you guys need want my help.

Best wishes,

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Posted by Gustaf Neumann on
As mentioned above, you have to run an "upgrade from the local file system" to process the changes in the .info file. just restarting the server after updating the info file is not enough.

In order to access the global parameter, one has to use parameter::get_global_value [1] instead of parameter::get. it might be an option to work towards unifying these calls, there is an agenda-point for parameters in the the 5.10.0 agenda.

-gn
[1] https://openacs.org/api-doc/proc-view?proc=parameter%3A%3Aget_global_value

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Posted by Iuri Sampaio on
Thanks Gustaf,
ad_proc parameter::get_global_value worked well.
It'd be great if I could participate in 5.10.0 agenda.
Best wishes,