Forum OpenACS Q&A: Some questions about OpenACS 4.6

Posted by Roger Lockerbie on 01/10/03 07:37 AM

Firstly, contrgratulations to the development team on this fine acheivement, as a long time user of ACS4.2, its incredible what you have acheived (especially the postgres/oracle duality).

We have written a couple of custom packages for openACS to support our newspaper site (http://www.bordermail.com.au).

One takes classifieds from the print product and puts them on the web (classiflow)

The other takes news stories from the front end system that are sent in a neutral XML format and puts them and the images into the content repository as Newsflow documents.

These documents may contain headlines, captions, photos, bodytext etc.

Currently it uses Oracles XML DOM java packages and SQLJ. I am thinking of using the snjava functionality to implement this under postgresql/openACS, is that considered OK by people here or should I use pure TCL, if so what pure TCL XML/Dom libraries are used.

Secondly, I have openFTS running (It was a beast as I was using mandrake rpms of Postgres and not compiling from source but I got there in the end.

I notice that there is a contract for the content repository (ie cr_revisions), does that mean that I will get openFTS searchability by default by using the content repository? (hope so :) )

Finally, when using openFTS does in support any soft of boolean operations?, I did some testing with the notes package and queries like "zebra" not "dog" and it was picking up "zebra" and "dog", does in not support booleans other than and?
Sorry for the generality of the questions, but so much has changed (for the better), and I have not touched the code for so long that templating, content repostitory, acs-objects etc all are looking rather strange again, not to mention openFTS, (spoiled by the ease of intermedia)....

Thanks for any help in advance

Roger.

2: Re: Some questions about OpenACS 4.6 (response to 1)

Posted by Roger Lockerbie on 01/10/03 07:39 AM

Woops, replying to myself, that should read "have written some packages for ACS and am looking to convert them to openACS"

sorry

Roger.

3: Re: Some questions about OpenACS 4.6 (response to 1)

Posted by Jun Yamog on 01/10/03 08:34 AM

Hi Roger,

Regarding openFTS on CR. It will not do it automatically, but one good thing is that you are already half way if you use CR. The db stuff that you need to do for OpenFTS is already done by nature that your object extended content revision.

What you need is just to make the service contracts for "datasource" and "url".

Try this:

https://openacs.org/search/search?q=openfts+datasource

https://openacs.org/doc/search/guidelines.html

If you are using CR you do not need to add triggers anymore.

4: Re: Some questions about OpenACS 4.6 (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 01/10/03 06:28 PM

We're going to switch to using tDOM as our standard XML parser throughout the toolkit and this approach will allow us to avoid having to jump through any painful hoops in an attempt to mimic Oracle's java-based XML support in PostgreSQL.

There's already an AOLserver module that's been written by the author of tDOM and everything I've read/heard suggests that both are excellent pieces of work.

If you work your way through this thread you'll see that Bart Teuwisse has already been using tDOM with AOLserver/OpenACS 4 with no problem whatsoever.

Originally we'd hoped to switch from ns_xml to tDOM for 4.6 but the AOLserver module release was delayed late summer/early fall so we dropped it as a 4.6 work item. We're definitely switching soon, though! For now there's no reason I know of that prevents you from loading the ns_xml module (for existing OpenACS 4.6 code) and tDOM (for forward-looking XML-handling code that you want to be compatible with 4.7)

5: Re: Some questions about OpenACS 4.6 (response to 4)

Posted by bob phillips on 01/13/03 09:19 PM

don, the link didn't work not found. can you suggest a keyword
or better link?

6: Re: Some questions about OpenACS 4.6 (response to 5)

Posted by Jeff Davis on 01/13/03 09:28 PM

I fixed Don's link above (was missing the http://)
https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=70077