Help required for updating the eZ publish database from external application.

Monday 14 February 2005 1:15:27 pm

Hi,

I have eZpublish 3 to publish my intranet web pages. One of the web pages displays an internal phonelist for my company.

I'm able to display the new person details when I add this information from the CMS web page. The CMS database(MySQL) is updated accordingly.

My query:

I have a phonelist application in VB 6.0, which I use to query the Exchange Server and get a list of all the address book entries. I want to populate the CMS database(MySQL) with these address book entries from my application.

I'm able to update the tables however when I try to access this person information from the CMS web page I cannot see the new person details.

I would appreciate some help regarding this. I'm unaware if I'm missing on something or some key data that is required for retrieving the record from the database.

Also if you can highlight how the CMS uses the database to retrieve information will be a great help.

Thanks for your help and assistance in advance.

Regards,
Megha B

Tuesday 15 February 2005 3:04:28 am

Hello,

I am not a specialist of EZ Publish yet and if somoeone from EZ-Team could review this post and possibly amend the content, this would be interesting for every one.

My opinion is that writing directly in the EZ database is not a good idea for the following reasons:
- while doing this, you actually bypass the abstraction layer of EZ Publish hence you might insert wrongly formatted data that later may appear unusable or you can event corrupt your database
- if you upgrade to a newer version of EZ Publish, the database structure might change and would make your import script not working anymore (data corrupting again is a possibility in this case)
- If you change the database (mysql to Oracle for instance) you might have to rework your script procedure

An alternate way to import data into ez-publish would be to export your external data to XML and then write a procedure as an extension that will parse this XML files and import the content as a series of ez publish objects.

I have written and tested such an extension. I consider contribute this code to the community if some people find it useful but it is not packaged yet.

Thank you for any feedback on this

regards

Olivier

Tuesday 15 February 2005 8:47:31 am

Olivier: I'd love to see such code contributed!

Visit http://triligon.org

Wednesday 16 February 2005 12:26:33 am

Hello

I will try to contribute the code on this site but I don't know yet how to contribute in the right section right now. I am asking the webmaster on how to do it...

Alternately in the mean time you could provide me email adresses where I could send you a zip of the module I wrote. I am not sure this is in the policy of this forum however. Let me know how to do.

It is definitely not practicable to write down the complete files here below.

rgds

Olivier

Wednesday 16 February 2005 1:15:54 am

You should probably upload the files to http://ez.no/community/contribs/import_export (there's a button at the bottom of the page). Quite simple, really.

ZIPs or tars are preferred so that everything's together.

Visit http://triligon.org

Wednesday 16 February 2005 6:08:34 am

New version uploaded - the previous one might not work due to last minute folder name changes.
O.

Wednesday 16 February 2005 1:30:00 pm

Hi Olivier,

Thanks for the code once again. I think its good and will definitely solve our issue. Just a couple of things. Is this code compatible with version 3.4.4 (we are using this version)?

Also we have three fields of datatype ezselection so will it work?

My VB application can generate the XML and I've identified all the values that will be required to create the object. But I'm still a little nervous how to upload this XML file or how the CMS will pick it up. I mean what will be the exact interface?

I'm totally new in this whole development process. I'm experienced using VB and ASP however have almost a negative knowledge in PHP. Please be patient with me.

Regards,
Megha B