Question

I am writing an integration piece between Drupal/Ubercart and a in-house admin system.

The customer uses Ubercart products with attributes (e.g. a Plaque, which can contain a name, a company, a registration date and month). When an order is placed, the values entered for the attributes are written to uc_order_products, where the data field contains the actual values entered by the user. As far as I can tell, this is the only place where product attributes values, as entered by an end user to place an order, is stored.

The encoded attribute values uses a format seen all over Drupal tables to encode objects:

a:3:{s:10:"attributes";a:4:{s:26:"Name (to appear on plaque)";a:1:{i:0;s:10:"Some  
Namee";}s:7:"Company";a:1:{i:0;s:28:"Some Company Name Goes here_";}s:19:"Certification 
Month";a:1:{i:0;s:0:"";}s:18:"Certification Year";a:1:
{i:0;s:4:"2011";}}s:9:"shippable";s:1:"1";s:6:"module";s:10:"uc_product";}

And expanded, it looks like this:

a:3:
{
    s:10:"attributes";
    a:4:
        {
            s:26:"Name (to appear on plaque)";
            a:1:
                {
                    i:0;
                    s:10:"Some Namee";
                }
            s:7:"Company";
            a:1:
                {
                    i:0;
                    s:28:"Some Company Name Goes Herep";
                }
            s:19:"Certification Month";
            a:1:
                {
                    i:0;
                    s:0:"";
                }
            s:18:"Certification Year";
            a:1:
                {
                    i:0;
                    s:4:"2011";
                }
        }
    s:9:"shippable";
    s:1:"1";
    s:6:"module";
    s:10:"uc_product";
}

I there a simple way to get to the individual field values within this text using SQL? I can write a SQL function to go look for specifics, but I’d like to know if someone knows of an existing MySQL approach (perhaps within Drupal) which would do this.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Don’t know if any built-in solution exists, but I ended up writing a SQL Function which takes as parameter text such as Name (to appear on plaque). The function then locates the text and extracts the succeeding { ... } block and from it retrieves the corresponding string value. Rough, but works in this case.

If someone has a better solution, I’d like to hear about it!