Querying Collections from dbus

[Ian Monroe]

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 3:22 AM, Casey Link <unnamedrambler at gmail.com> wrote:
> There have been quite a few requests lately for some way to query
> collections  via dbus.  Mark and I discussed this a bit on IRC.
>
> In 1.4, there was only one collection and you used SQL to query it. In
> 2.x we have multiple collections and they don't all use SQL - hence
> the QueryMaker. Obviously to provide the most robust support to
> scripters, amarok should expose some way to interact with the
> querymakers for the active collections. How feasible is this? I
> suspect Nikolaj and Maxx will have some clue.
>
> Additionally, Mark stressed that a simple SQL pass-through dbus method
> for the local collection would be helpful for testing and make some
> people happy.
>
> Thoughts? Any volunteers? JJ?


D-Bus not so much. I don't get why they need database access.
Debugging isn't enough reason, for debugging it makes a lot of sense
to start your own mysql server so that you can use fullblown MySQL
applications.  People who do complicated out-of-process things are
already lauching that process from within a QtScript.

Anyways I've always thought QtScript needed a collection interface.
This was reaffrimed when I looked at the code for the ampache server
script, which of course has tons of SQL queries. This obviously isn't
ideal since our schema has no guarantee for stability.

As far as feasibility, well there's nothing you can do in C++ that
can't be mapped into QtScript. The challenge is mostly coming up with
an easy-to-use API. I volunteer to implement an API someone else
designs. Max's idea of executing XML would be simple to implement but
pretty cumbersome to use. Ideally the QtScript API should be even
easier then the internal QueryBuilder API.

Ian