Hi all,
For a MediaWiki extension I'm working on (see http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-April/060254.html), an effectively plain-text file will need to be converted into a static image. I've got a set of scripts that does that, but it takes my medium-grade consumer laptop about 30 seconds to convert the plain-text file into a ray-traced static image. Since ray-tracing the images being created here substantially improves their visual quality, my impression is that it's worth a moderately expensive transformation operation like this, but only if the operation is done once.
Given that, I assume it'd be best to do this transformation immediately after the plain-text file has completed uploading. Is that right? If not, what's a better time/way to do that processing?
I've looked into MediaWiki's 'UploadComplete' event hook to accomplish this. That handler gives a way to access information about the upload and the local file. However, I haven't been able to find a way to get the uploaded file's path on the local file system, which I would need to do the transformation. Looking around related files I see references to $srcPath, which seems like what I would need. Am I just missing some getter method for file system path data in UploadBase.php or LocalFile.php? How can I get the information about an uploaded file's location on the file system while in an onUploadComplete-like object method in my extension?
Thanks, Eric