Info of the current
entry items (name,storage size,data type).
First, explanation for name:
This is where you name the items
a DB entry should contain. For example, if you try to make an addressbook, you
might want the names to be "*name,e-mail,telephone,web
site,image,status,hits,birthday,comment,time stamp,*password" here (Note that
each of these names should be the first value on each line (size and type
are 2nd and 3rd value, respectively). Explanations for item size and type are
described below). The "*" indicates this is an item that must be filled in
when the DB entry is added or changed. The total number of the items in a DB
entry cannot exceed 500. You should separate each item with a "," and do not
leave spaces between "," and item names. To ensure correct parsing of your
html forms, your item names should not contain the plus sign --- "+". In
addition, usually you would want to make the first item required. Please note
that you should always put a name for each item in your DB entry, and you
should always assign a size for each item. You should NEVER leave any item
name or size empty like this:"entry item name=name,,telephone,web
site,image,status" (in your .ini file). This will cause the "telephone,web
site,image,status" items not read in by POD. In fact, make it a habbit not to
write anything like "...,,..." in any DB configurations because that will
cause anything behind ",," be discarded by POD. You should at least write
something like "...,a,..." to avoid losing data behind the second
comma.
Second, storage size (in characters) of current
entry items
Here you indicates at most how much space can each item take in your DB.
You should try to plan efficiently here and do not allocate huge storage
that are not needed. For example, if you allocate "400" for name item, it
sure is allowed, but you probably wasted at least 350 characters in your
DB. Please note that the speed of POD is directly related to the size of
the DB file. In fact, the speed of DB is limited by how fast your hard drive
allows it to read the DB file. An excessively big DB file will slow down
your DB significantly. One thing you should note is that for items of number
data type, the storage shouldn't be more than 11 because the number data
type should not be longer than 10 characters (in fact, you should make it
smaller than 10 or else you should use string as data type. For this reason,
it is better that you use "string" as the type for ISBN number--10 characters
long--for books, not "number" as type. This way in fact ISBN number should
be sorted correctly), and an extra one character is needed for each item
for POD's internal usage. Therefore if you indicate "40" for an item, that
item can at most store 39 characters' worth of data. You should indicate
all the storage sizes for each of the item you named in 1. You should allow
20 characters for any item to be used as time stamp. Any item longer than
specified length will be automatically truncated when they are submitted
to POD and an indication will show up in browser. If this happened during
converion of DB item schema, it will be reported as well.
Third, data type of current entry items
Here the data type of the DB entry items are indicated. For
example, for the above example, the data typesmay
be "string,string,phone,string,string,string,number,time,string,time,string", where telephone item takes the data type of
"phone", hits item takes the type of "number", time stamp item takes "time" while all
others take "string" as their data type. string,number,time,phone are the only
4 types supported so far in POD 5.0. You should indicate all the
data types for each of the item you named in
1.