Extension talk:External Data/Archive 2017 to 2018

Is the usage of SQL group by possible?
I would consider "group by" extremly useful since it would be possible to create statistics for database content really easily. --WolfgangFahl (talk) 12:11, 10 January 2017 (UTC)
 * 1) Is the usage of SQL "group by" possible?
 * 2) if yes how?
 * 3) if no as it was pointed out in Extension_talk:External_Data/Archive_2013 where would a CR be posted?


 * No, it's still not possible, though I can see how it would be useful. What's a CR? Yaron Koren (talk) 14:35, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

How to pass header value to request?
With some API we need to pass in the headers some value (for example: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/api/README.html#authentication) I tried url=--header "PRIVATE-TOKEN: xxxxxxxxxxxxxx" https://myserver/api/v1/list/all or url=https://myserver/api/v1/list/all,array('PRIVATE-TOKEN'=>'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx') But not chance. How can we achieve this? if this is possible, can we have an example of how?


 * The #get_web_data function only works with RESTful APIs; #get_soap_data might work in this case. Yaron Koren (talk) 15:52, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

Dash character in data
Hello

We found when displaying csv file data with a) cells that contain just a dash character, or b) cells that contain text and start with a dash character that any attempt to render this data into a table will cause rows to break at that cell. This is presumably because the parser inserts | for a column break and then the - from the string, resulting in |- which is a special string which means 'new row'.

To resolve this I edited the function GetCSVData in the file ED_Utils.php. In the foreach loop just before the return statement, I added a check for the dash character which replaces it with a dash wrapped in tag. This resolves the issue. Note that this issue likely still exists when other parsers like get_db_data are used, since I only resolved it in the GetCSVData function.

Note that I have had to replace the word nowiki with n0wiki below, because it was impossible to display this code since it was closing nowiki brackets.


 * Great, thanks for this patch! Is that first "if" check necessary? Maybe everything can be handled with just the "if substr" call? Yaron Koren (talk) 12:19, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

PHP Notice in error logs
Hi I can see theses messages in the apache server error log

PHP Notice: Second parameter should not be a timeout. [Called from EDUtils::fetchURL in /opt/mediawiki/extensions/ExternalData/ED_Utils.php at line 882]

ExternalData 1.8.3 Mediawiki 1.27.3

Cheers

Ubibene

Daisy Chaining
Hey, is there a way to daisy-chain queries? As far as i can see one can only enter one URL to get data from. My usecase: get some data, create a table with it and then use coordinates from the first query in a secondary query for reverse geocoding (for each individual entry). Is this possible somehow or is further explainantion required?


 * If I understand the question correctly, you can just cycle through the data twice, by calling #for_external_table twice - the data won't get cleared after the first call. Or am I misunderstanding something? Yaron Koren (talk) 03:20, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
 * In my specific usecase i'm building a table from an overpass query which returns xml. I then want to geocode every coordinate of that table via nominatim (returns xml too) to a specific country.