Hello!
I am new to MediaWiki though I know some PHP programming.
I have a variety of data sources (e.g. relational databases, excel files, text files, Java beans, PHP classes, web services). I want to set up a Wiki that will read from and write to these data sources.
One idea I have is to write a custom tag (let's call it an XData tag or external data source tag), used like in this sample article:
The city of Manila has <xdata source="http://some.almanac.or.uri">8,500,000</xdata> inhabitants.
My first question: What do you folks think about this idea? Are there other (possibly more elegant) ways of accomplishing the same objective? Some existing extension perhaps? InputBox?
Let's pursue the XData idea a little further. Suppose there is already an article on Manila (City) where the population is <xdata ...>8,500,000</xdata>. Suppose I edit the article and changed this to 10,000,000. I would then like to update the underlying (external) data source.
My questions:
1) How do I do this? Exactly which event (hook) do I use? ArticleSave? 2) Is there an MWiki function that checks if an article has been changed or not? 3) How do I know if the text changed was between <xdata> tags or not (short of writing my own article text parser)?
Serge
Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com