}
This
method fails dismally. It would be very non-portable
between versions
of PMA, and additionally, how do you handle multi-dimensonal
data without
adding more rows?
of course this was a simple example, of course this would not work as simple
as that. But you do not add more rows, you add more tables.
A configuration file might have two or three servers, each
with a number
of IP Allow/Deny rules.
Effectively, we have array nesting 3 levels deep already with this, so
giving each variable a field in the table is not practical.
why not? a new level of the array only means a new foreign_table
Additionally, my method using XML + XPath allows the
administrator of each
copy of PMA to completely customize what the user is allowed
to change,
with only a single line in the configuration file. (This is
one of those
security preferences that is not available in the DB-Config level).
<snip />
Let me finish coding it up the way I have in mind,
with the
customizability and view towards the future, and then tell me
if you can
port all of those features to PHP3 without XPath. That XPath
hmm well i am still not convinced that what we have here is a problem so new
and so complex that it cannot be resolved with normal methods. each
groupware application like phprojekt or phpgroupware will have had at least
the same complexities to deal with. And i do think that when you have three
levels of the array you don't serialize or xml it to try to put it in one
cell of one table but you simply use three normalized tables.
but obviously this has been discussed here before (allthough i couldn't find
it searching the mailinglistarchive) and i am not even one of the developers
so don't worry ´bout me, i am sure your code will work nice as well, and
i'll be glad to see all those features when i finally decide to update all
my servers to 4.2.
Regards
Mike