Re: [CODE4LIB] Integrating OCS and Drupal

[John Fereira]

Lise Brin wrote:

Have any of you done any work integrating OCS (Open Conference Systems)
with Drupal?
  
No, but I am using Drupal to build a conference management site for an 
open source organization I'm involved in.  I'm essentially porting an 
old, very poorly written (not my doing) java web application into 
Drupal.  As it is now, I'm pretty much the only person that understand 
the old conference management web application so I'm developing 
something that others on the conference planning committees can use.

Re: [CODE4LIB] Integrating OCS and Drupal

[Mark Jordan]

Hi Lisa,

I'm cc'ing the drupal4lib list in case anyone there wants to jump in.

Depending on what level of integration you're after, it would pretty straight 
forward to write a Drupal module that reads data from an instance of OCS and 
displays it in a block, for example. A common strategy in Drupal development is 
to connect to an external database using the db_set_active() function (see 
http://drupal.org/node/18429 for detail), populate the Drupal block, and then 
switch back to Drupal's default database. Of course, you'd have to write SQL to 
get the desired data out of the OCS tables but that shouldn't be very difficult.

Also, the new Drupal Views2 API should let you do this in a more sophisticated 
way than straight SQL can (see http://drupal.org/node/235062#comment-1050295 
for an example), and now that the Views2 module has been officially released, 
this approach might be worth investigating. 

If you want to do more than just read data from OCS into your Drupal instance, 
you'd have to do more work than what I describe above. Since OCS does a lot of 
workflow management, I'd caution against injecting data into the OCS database 
that could cause problems with workflows or submission status. Check the 
OCS/PKP support forums, and post questions if necessary, before using an 
external application to update the OCS database.

All that being said, can you provide more detail on what you mean by 
'integration'?

Mark

Mark Jordan
Head of Library Systems
W.A.C. Bennett Library, Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, British Columbia, V5A 1S6, Canada
Voice: 778.782.5753 / Fax: 778.782.3023
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

- Lise Brin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Have any of you done any work integrating OCS (Open Conference
 Systems)
 with Drupal?
 
  
 
  
 
 **
 
 Lise Brin, MLIS
 
 Emerging Services Librarian
 
 St. Francis Xavier University
 
 PO Box 5000
 
 Antigonish NS
 
 B2G 2W5
 
 Phone (902) 867-3669