Blogs

Closing in on the 1.6 release...

We made our goal for last week - reducing the existing queue items to 4! Most of the team has switched to unit testing mode. Each team member is taking on a group of Resolved issues from the master 1.6 queue and retesting the functionality. This has surfaced 2 new problems - bringing the total open count to 6 as of this morning.

In general, we are trying to make sure that a person other than the original assignee does the unit tests - so there is another set of eyes. After testing, team members are "signing off" on the issue by marking it Closed.

A common question on the mailing list has been about CiviCRM search, scalability and speed. Currently basic/advanced search has been designed to try to get as many matches as possible from your contact data. However trying to get as many matches as possible results in some major inefficiencies which does not work for data sets of reasonable size

Currently the default search does the following:

1. For any value typed in the name field, it searches the civicrm_contact table and the civicrm_email table. It connects the two tables using two LEFT JOIN's via the civicrm_location table. LEFT JOIN's are not very efficient sql operators

CiviCRM Forms and Wizards (multi-page forms) are based on PEAR's HTML_QuickForm_Controller. (QFC). QFC in turn is based on HTML_QuickForm (QF). It was easier for us to model a single form as a one page wizard, and hence all CiviCRM forms are instances of QFC

The basic Form object is CRM_Core_Form. All forms are derived from this class. Each derived class is expected to implement the following functions

This is what worked for me using Control Panel, FTP, File Manager and PHPMyAdmin.

Before you begin make sure you have a working Drupal 4.7 already installed. Have the name of the database, database user and password handy as well as the name of your mysql host. If you can’t find the name of your mysql host anywhere on your host’s site then your mysql host is probably localhost. Save yourself the aggravation and get all these things written down beside you before you even start installing CiviCRM.

1. Use FTP to upload the zip/tar CiviCRM directly into the drupal/modules folder.

2. Go to your Control Panel or whatever method you use to create new databases and create a new database called civicrm. You will already have a database user name and password from your Drupal installation. Go to your list of database users and add a user to the new civicrm database you just created. Make sure to give the user full privileges.

We now move onto the more interesting stuff of what really happens when a request is made and the objects that are responsible for building the response. The top level CiviCRM objects are:

CiviCRM uses the PEAR package DB_DataObject to access the mysql database. Doing so reduces the amount of sql we need to write to fetch / store values for a single table. For queries involving more than one table, we write them manually since since it was fairly painful to try to force complicated queries using DB_DataObject (we did use DB_DO for multiple table queries when we wrote EmailNow, in the end we felt the hoops we had to jump through was not worth the effort and hence the current scheme)

The basic PHP classes that represent a table are called DAO's (Data Access Objects). These are generated automatically by (xml/GenCode.php) which also generates the sql structure for that specific table. The xml files representing the schema is stored under CIVCRM_ROOT/xml/schema. The sql file generated (civicrm_41.mysql and civicrm_40.mysql) are stored under CIVICRM_ROOT/sql (note that the generated files are not present in the svn repository). The DAO files are stored under CIVICRM_ROOT/CRM/Core/DAO (and under appropriate directories based on what table it is, this is configured in the xml representation.

here is a tentative schedule for CiviCRM v1.6. The feature list for v1.6 is here. As all good open source software projects, the below schedule is subject to change :)

Make sure you read the Introduction Chapter of this series for a better understanding of the below. Developers might be interested in installing CiviCRM from our svn repository

Some of the important directories under CiviCRM svn root are:

We made excellent progress on our 1.6 queue last week. All but one of the issues targeted have been moved into resolved status. The queue is now down to 12 items (from 23 last week). Some team members will be moving into active QA mode this week - doing regression testing on the 1.6 resolved queue to verify that things haven't gotten broken since they were resolved earlier in the release cycle.

For the coming week we'll try to get the queue down to 5 issues or less... and finish the following larger issues: