New Salsa module

Trellon is happy to announce yet another salsa module (in http://drupal.org/project/salsa), which does a lot more to integrate Salsa with Drupal than the currently available modules.

The core module (salsa.module), is mostly an API, but it doesn't use the same call interface as the salsa_api module. There are salsa_get_objects(), salsa_save() and salsa_delete() functions which receive two parameters: the Salsa table name ('supporter', 'event', etc.) and the query/data to be passed to salsa in the URL in plain text (something like 'condition=supporter_KEY>1&condition=supporter_KEY<2').

Those API functions will return the simpleXML object and not an array like salsa_api (call salsa_simplexml2array() to convert to one), since I wanted to retain the capacity of using the xpath functions.

An important issue not addressed by the salsa_api module is the capability of getting more than 500 results from Salsa. When Salsa returns 500 elements as the result of a query, the salsa module will repeat the request with offset +500 to get more data.

Just as an aside, the reason why I didn't base my work on the salsa_api module is that besides forcing me to use arrays instead of objects, a module which seems to be abandoned for 1.5 years should not be a dependency if it can be avoided.

Regarding the salsa_supporters, module I found that one to not be exploiting the full power of Drupal, as it kept the Salsa data in its own tables.. The salsa module maps salsa fields to Drupal-core profile fields and content_profile's CCK fields (text fields only), enabling full-use of modules designed to interact with user and node objects.

Give it a try and give me your comments about it..

João Ventura

PS: Word of caution, the module is in active development, and there's no documentation for it yet.. If you understand PHP, you'll be able to open the source and see what it's doing. For the rest, I hope I made it usable enough in admin/settings/salsa.