Querying Collections from dbus

[Maximilian Kossick]

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 3:05 PM, Ian Monroe <ian.monroe at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Well, scripts shouldn't use XML obviously. But a XML query interface
seems the best way to go if we want to expose this functionality using
dbus