Book.module changes from Drupal 5.x -> 6.x

Posted by tanoshimi on January 31, 2008 at 11:16pm

Can anybody point me in the direction of some documentation regarding changes to book.module from Drupal 5.x -> 6.x?

I'm trying to programatically (i.e. at the database level) migrate a large number of books from a 5.x site to the RC3 of Drupal 6, and I've run into some problems regarding the schema changes...

In 5.x, a book page is defined by an entry with type 'book' in the node table, and a corresponding entry in the book table (nid) to define its relationship to a parent page (parent) - if the parent is 0 then it's a top level book. Easy.

However, in 6.x, the book table now contains an nid, bid(?), and mlid(?), and the mlid links to a book-toc-xxx record in the menu_links table... and in the drupal interface itself, I notice that at node/add/book I can no longer simply select a parent book page, but I have to choose an existing book AND a parent page within that book!?

admin/help/book doesn't help much,
http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/book/ has not been updated yet for version 6.x and
http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-dojo/book-project seems to discuss some of these changes, but fizzles out before explaining them fully...

Any help much appreciated.

Comments

Some progress...

Posted by tanoshimi on February 1, 2008 at 12:04pm

Ok, so scanning through the book_update_6000 function in book.install has enlightened me (a bit), but it's not that easy to follow... I'll try to document what I've found, and make this into a handbook page when it's complete.

The addition of the need to select a book first before selecting a parent is in order to make a better UI rather than having to scroll through all book pages as potential parents when adding a new page, you can only choose pages from the book you selected. This makes sense.
To facilitate this, the book table now contains a bid (Book id) field - which is the nid of the top-level page within the book.
Each page within the book also has a mlid (Menu links id) field to join to the menu_links table. This is necessary because the hierarchy of book pages is now done in menu_links rather than in book.
This is where it gets a bit complicated, because I have yet to figure out the detail of the new menu_links table, but it seems that plid in menu_links gives the mlid of the parent book page, module is always 'book', and menu_name is a string with 'book-toc-' + the nid of the top-level page within the book.
However, there's still a lot more fields in menu_links that I haven't quite worked out what they do yet - router_path, link_path, and the mysteriously title p1, p2, p3, p4, p5, p6, p7, p8, and p9, which seem to be some sort of uber-hierarchy system.... not sure what to do with these yet

Will continue investigating...

Thanks for posting your findings

Posted by CompShack on February 8, 2008 at 1:26am

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p1, p2, p3, ....

Posted by natuk on August 13, 2008 at 1:26pm

These appear to store the previous parents of a node. I.e. not only the direct parent but the whole chain to the top-level node. If I have understood this correctly, does this mean that the maximum number of generations in a hierarchy before a node are 10? Isn't this a dreadful limitation?

Thanks for posting. I am

Posted by BlakeLucchesi on March 20, 2008 at 6:23am

Thanks for posting. I am currently investigating upgrade options for the book module and/or the outline module, I really like that book v6.x allows you to define any content type to be part of the book hierarchy, which is what the outline module does for drupal 5. I would imagine that as long as you can translate the hierarchies to a different table layout it shouldn't be incredibly difficult, considering at the base level it is still just a hierarchy with nodes pointing to one another.

Does anyone know the complete

Posted by prokopton on December 16, 2010 at 10:43am

Does anyone know the complete mysql command to re-create the "book" table for Drupal 6.19 using the mysql command line?

Thanks.