Symphony.

In order to learn my way around Symphony, I’m adapting some previous XSLT work that I’ve done to its framework. Liking it so far. I tried to search the forum for answers to two questions and didn’t see them, so apologies in advance if I overlooked anything.

1) Is there any way to supply POST arguments when requesting data from a dynamic DS? This is necessary if the remote API you’re using to generate your pages requires authentication, and for whatever reason you would prefer/need to use POST over GET.

2) It seems that the minimum cache time for a dynamic DS is one minute. Under certain circumstances it’s desirable to selectively not cache a dynamic DS. As far as I can tell this isn’t possible. Is there anything specifically in the way of changing this in the future? I know it’s not wise to get in the habit of avoiding the cache, but it’s nice to have the option.

Nitpicks aside, very nice product. I’ve been wanting a good XSLT backend like this for awhile now.

1) Is there any way to supply POST arguments when requesting data from a dynamic DS? This is necessary if the remote API you’re using to generate your pages requires authentication, and for whatever reason you would prefer/need to use POST over GET.

Good idea, and not that I know of. If you’re happy to customise the DS PHP file you could achieve this. Take a look at the PHP file creates (/workspace/data-sources/data.your-ds-name.php) and the grab() function. Before the include you could modify the objects dsParamURL property:

$this->dsParamURL = 'http://your-domain.com/' . $_POST['file'] . '.xml';

2) It seems that the minimum cache time for a dynamic DS is one minute. Under certain circumstances it’s desirable to selectively not cache a dynamic DS. As far as I can tell this isn’t possible. Is there anything specifically in the way of changing this in the future? I know it’s not wise to get in the habit of avoiding the cache, but it’s nice to have the option.

Maybe it should accept a value of 0 to never cache?

1) Good idea, and not that I know of. If you’re happy to customise the DS PHP file you could achieve this. Take a look at the PHP file creates (/workspace/data-sources/data.your-ds-name.php) and the grab() function.

That’ll help me with some of the leisure time work I do, thanks. Speaking as someone who works for a company in the web services industry though, I can attest that support for this would be a good way to help increase commercial adoption. Authentication against remote data feeds is an important item for them.

2) Maybe it should accept a value of 0 to never cache?

Makes sense to me. At that point the option might be better worded as “Maximum lifetime in the cache is X minutes.” (currently “Update cached result every X minutes”)

Speaking as someone who works for a company in the web services industry though, I can attest that support for this would be a good way to help increase commercial adoption.

Sounds like a good reason to me. On this front, any other thoughts would be highly valued.

Sounds like a good reason to me. On this front, any other thoughts would be highly valued.

Getting a bit OT here as far as the original subject goes, but the only other thing immediately coming to mind is Oracle support. I’d never use it on my servers at home, but it’s the main database engine used where I work. MySQL and Oracle are the big two used in the industry right now as far as I know.

The problem with Oracle support is that not many OS enthusiasts (such as myself) are particularly interested in it, or would be willing to contribute code for it due to lack of exposure. If it were to be added, it’d probably have to be done by the parties who stand to benefit from Symphony support licensing, and they’d have to allocate the resources to implement+support it. :\