Taxonomy Manual SQL Insert Issues

Thanks for the response! It's going to take me a few days to dissect and understand what you said in Drupal/dev terms. I'm not too familiar with the API's yet. Still learning it. Right now, I'm still trying to master theming. Not sure how I'm going to code it yet but I think I'll *eventually* understand what you said. Presumably, I will be studying the API's that deal with nodes...?

I'm sorry if this is taking up more than you'd like and I'd understand if you didn't respond after this one. But here's how I was anticipating on doing it (only because it was the most straight forward way for me with the time limitation I have). You can almost consider it reverse engineering Drupal.

1. Study the tables in the oldDB. Insert a new node using through the old website. Note changes made to the DB. (probably impossible to get it all).
2. Create the new content type with CCK fields that I wanted in the New website. Insert a node also through the website. Note changes to the DB.
3. INSERT into newDB SELECT from oldDB, the fields/tables that I want. Make necessary changes to any other DB's that help "sequence". Worse comes to worse, scratch and try different method.
4. Test.

I'll study the API's a bit more though. Again, thank you for reading this far! =D

Hey Dan,

Just wanted to say thanks again. After a lot of trial and error, I managed to get it to work....sorta of in the same direction as what you had suggested in your initial comment..but not quite the same. I did get critical data across into the newDB. But I wanted to share my particular method with you if you're interested in commenting any further.

1) script written on a Page Type (accessible from node/4312). the script basically was a for loop that did a node_load($nid) from 1 to 4311 and wrote to an external file (export.txt). see output below. this exported the very specific pieces of data that i wanted in the form of a a new node. the script was fined tuned by looking at a print_r($node) (of the target node type you mentioned). (Now i understand what you meant by build a node from scratch.)

/* actual output from the export script within the node/4312.
   export directory is written in old Drupal root directory.
   I had to manually create the file first because I was
   initially using append. */  

$node = new StdClass(); //manually outputted once

/* for loop output below */
$node->title = "Title of the node";
$node->body = "<p>The body text of the node, etc.</p>";
$node->field_address[0]['value'] = "1234 Campus Drive";
$node->field_address[0]['view'] = "1234 Campus Drive";
$node->field_address2[0]['value'] = "";
$node->field_address2[0]['view'] = "";
$node->field_address3[0]['value'] = "";
$node->field_address3[0]['view'] = "";
$node->field_city[0]['value'] = "Los Angeles";
$node->field_city[0]['view'] = "Los Angeles";
$node->field_state[0]['value'] = "CA";
$node->field_state[0]['view'] = "CA";
$node->field_postal_code[0]['value'] = "12345";
$node->field_postal_code[0]['view'] = "12345";
$node->field_country[0]['value'] = "";
$node->field_country[0]['view'] = "";
$node->field_website[0]['value'] = "";
$node->field_website[0]['view'] = "";
$node->field_short[0]['value'] = "Cheaper Textbooks";
$node->field_short[0]['view'] = "Cheaper Textbooks";
$node->field_phone[0]['value'] = "(555) 555-5555";
$node->field_phone[0]['view'] = "(555) 555-5555";
$node->field_fax[0]['value'] = "";
$node->field_fax[0]['view'] = "";
$node->field_website[0]['value'] = "";
$node->field_website[0]['view'] = "";
$node->type = "listing";
$node->status = 1;
$node->promote = 0;
$node->sticky = 0;
$node->revision = 0;
$node = node_submit($node);
node_save($node);

unset($node);//unset freed up memory so more data could be imported on each "run" of the import.
/* end forloop output */

/* next node output, etc... */

2) Wrote an external PHP script (bootstrapped Drupal manually). Placed this script in the root directory of the newDB. Due to memory issues on the server, I had to do several exports, eg 1-500, 501-1000, etc... and then do multiple imports too. but it worked. the import consisted of a series of copy from export, paste into import.php, save import.php, run import.php from browser. rinse. repeat. though still not as bad any manually entering one node at a time via the GUI of Drupal, it was still a tedious process.

/* import.php*/
<?php
exec("/usr/bin/clear");
include_once('includes/bootstrap.inc');
drupal_bootstrap(DRUPAL_BOOTSTRAP_FULL);
bootstrap_invoke_all('init');
ini_set('memory_limit', '512M');
echo "Bootstrap sucessfull\n<br>\n<br>";

//Authenticate as user 1
user_authenticate('administrator', 'password');

/***********************/
/* pasted exported code here */
/***********************/


  echo " Done\n";

?>

I however still couldn't figure out how to write a script that directly pulled from oldDB and dumped into newDB using Drupal or an external script. I thought about how I would do it via the bootstrap process but I could only bootstrap one instance of Drupal at a time. I guess i don't understand it enough. I'm sure you would've written a much fancier script that did an export from oldDB and immediately dumped it into a newDB.

But this is a one time thing. Hopefully, I'll never have to do this again..although it was a good learning experience because i'm a lot more comfortable with the backend now. I'm sure once I get more comfortable with Drupal then I'll probably be able to write smarter code.

Cheers!...Hope this helped someone else.