Question

Hi, we're investigating twiki to find out if or how it is possible to use twiki as a documentation frontend to a database.

This means:

twikisite.com/twiki/docweb/server01

would use a template, which contain some sql queries including %TOPIC - to have server documentation dynamic and automatically listed based on the current entries in the databse...

This means that the topic is kind of "auto" created...

Can this be done, and if so - what would be the best approach? I can't seem to get twiki to create topics on it's own - would it be possible to manually create the topics in the shell?

Any pointers or ideas is greatly appreciated..

Thanks

Kristoffer

Environment

-- TWikiGuest - 21 May 2007

Answer

If you answer a question - or have a question you asked answered by someone - please remember to edit the page and set the status to answered. The status is in a drop-down list below the edit box.

I'm thinking outloud here, err, typing...anyway.

You could, theoretically, have one page that contains a search to list all the available documents. This would simply query the database and generate a list of title or something. Each title would be linked to ONE twiki topic that had the general structure of your documentation and knew how to display it based on another query to the database. The links from the list page would include a url parameter added to it telling the query the docID or some such thing. In this example, you're not creating topics at all. You have one topic to list the documents, and one topic to display a single document. The display topic will display any document you want, you'd just tell it the docID and it brings back the results from the database.

This should work in principal.

Good luck and let me know if it does, or if you've come up with another solution.

-- MatthewCardozo - 26 Jun 2007

You could simple create one query topic and pass the server name as a URL parameter, which you can pass along to your SQL query. Example URL:

twikisite.com/twiki/Docweb/ServerQuery?server=server01

Alternatively, as a hack, you could auto-create topics even with a shell script if you do not mind missing history topics. Simple dump files in the TWiki syntax into the twiki/data/Docweb directory.

-- PeterThoeny - 12 Aug 2007