[ic] IC and BBS

Ed LaFrance interchange-users@interchange.redhat.com
Thu Apr 18 13:00:01 2002


At 11:36 PM 04/17/2002 -0700, you wrote:
>Hi guys
>
>Has anyone every succesfully integrated a BBS system with Interchange. I
>don't want to reinvent the wheel, and I also don't want to bulk up userdb.
>
>I was thinking it can be as minimal as making Interchange "write" username
>and password on "create account" to the BBS table as well as userdb. So
>there would be a central sign UP point. Then in the BBS system, you would
>disable it's "create account" feature, only leaving it's "log in" feature
>functional. Thus you would sign up with one username and password in the
>store (IC) and the same username and password would be usable if you chose
>to log into the stores BBS system. The BBS would still write it's info to
>the BBS native table (mysql, etc).
>
>I would really like to have a BBS system, but am turned off by having to ask
>for two usernames and passwords. It would get kinda odd for a customer to
>log in IC, and then find his same username is already taken on the sites
>BBS. That would look bad.
>
>We could make a module for some popular BBS, much like has been done for
>payment gateways. I think a BBS system would be a nice addition to any IC
>store.
>
>Has anybody done something like this, or have any experience making IC write
>to two databases? Anybody want to help? I know I wouldn't be able to do this
>on my own so any interest is appreciated.

Paul -

If you take a look cat yourcat/dbconf/mysql/*.mysql, you'll see that each 
table definition file starts with the SQL_DSN, SQLUSER and SQLPASS, among 
other things. These values do not have to be the same for all tables. For 
instance, if your BBS uses MySQL to manage a database called BBS which 
contains a table called 'users' for BBS logins, and accesses that database 
with username 'foo' and password 'bar', you could setup 
yourcat/dbconf/mysql/users.mysql for your catalog. The file contents would 
look something like this:

Database  users  users.txt   dbi:mysql:BBS
Database  users  USER       foo
Database  users  PASS       bar

...then IC should be able to read and write the users table, and basically 
do anything to it that mysql user 'foo' can do. You would also want to 
instruct IC to never import from this table from a source text file, I 
would think; this would either require another line in the above file:

Database  users  NOIMPORT  1

(unsure about that)

...or just specify the table name in the NoImport directive string in 
catalog.cfg:

NoImport  users

- Ed L.



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