Question

I create a custom import and export, at the moment as an external script (via bootstrap), i plan to create a module in a more generic fashion lateron.

I am building a frontend for nagios and for our host management and nagios configuration btw. Maybe it might become useful for other environments (networkmanagement)

Now i need to know how to get list of all nodes of type x?

I want to avoid direct SQL.

A suggestion i got was to make an rss and parse it
but i acess the drupal db a dozen times to extract various nodes, so it feels strange to do a web request for one thing

So what i am looking for as newbie drupal dev is just a pointer to basic search module api for this task

TIA
florian

Answer 1

Why do you want to avoid using SQL?

If you want to get info about what’s in your db, like all the nodes of type x, the only way to get it, is through a SQL query, unless you have the data extracted already.

A query like

db_query("SELECT title, nid FROM {node} WHERE type = 'x';");

shouldn’t be the thing that ruins your performance.

Edit:
The link you provided is a from Drupal 7, so you have to be be careful reading this. The reason is that in Drupal 7 it is not only possible to use db_query which basically is wrapper for the php functions mysql_query, pg_query. It’s a bit different and using it, you wont have to use db_specific code. Anyways new in Drupal 7 is something that is a bit like an ORM. I haven’t read about it in detail, but the idea is that you can build a query using commands on an object. This is probably what you are after. However, Drupal 7 is not ready at all for production sites. There are still a lot of critical issues and security issues. So this wont be a possibility for quite some time.

Edit 2:
If you want to get the node title and body, this is what you should do:

$type = 'x';
$query = db_query("SELECT r.nid, r.title, r.body FROM {node} AS n 
                  LEFT JOIN {node_revisions} AS r ON r.nid = n.nid
                  WHERE type = '%s';", array($type));
$nodes = array();
while ($node = db_fetch_object($query)) {
    $nodes[$node->nid] = $node;
}

You can use db_fetch_array instead of db_fetch_object` if you want to extract arrays instead of objects from the db.