understanding load and save functions???

Could someone please help me understand these two functions (load and save). As best as I can tell these are the two functions I want to deal with. What I am thinking of doing is making a mod/hack/variant... (call it what you want) for a little project of mine but I want to store all of the data that gallery stores, along with quite a bit of additional information in a MySQL database. It looks to me like this is where all of the ".dat" magic takes place (reading and writing the .dat files). I don't want to modify anymore than necessary and I would think it should be pretty clean. I could be way off here but it seems that Gallery is just taking all of the data in an object, serializing it and storing it in a file, reading and unserializing it as needed. But what is the object and its structure? maybe I am over-simplifying this but any help would be appreciated.

Regards,
Richard

ok, I came up with a data structure for the tables based on what I could find. I am still very unsure about some of these data types and their max lengths. I am begining to re-write the load and save functions. For now I have decided to have seperate functions called sql_load and sql_save. The save function will run both the normal file based save and the sql_save. The load function will try to load from sql_load first and failing that it will load from the file. Hopefully all goes well and I will be able to stop using the files at all. But for now this is how I will do it. If anyone would like to help or could even just go over the sql structure and tell me what, if anything, needs to be changed, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Richard Benfield

<!-- BBCode Start --><TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font class="pn-sub">Code:</font><HR></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT class="pn-sub"><PRE>
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `gallery_album`;
CREATE TABLE `gallery_album` (
`gaid` INT (11) UNSIGNED AUTO_INCREMENT,
`dir` VARCHAR (100),
`updateSerial` BIGINT UNSIGNED,
`version` INT (5) UNSIGNED,
`tsilb` VARCHAR (100),
`fields_title` VARCHAR (100),
`fields_description` TEXT,
`fields_nextname` VARCHAR (100),
`fields_bgcolor` VARCHAR (20),
`fields_textcolor` VARCHAR (20),
`fields_linkcolor` VARCHAR (20),
`fields_font` VARCHAR (50),
`fields_border` VARCHAR (5),
`fields_bordercolor` VARCHAR (20),
`fields_returnto` VARCHAR (20),
`fields_thumb_size` VARCHAR (10),
`fields_resize_size` VARCHAR (10),
`fields_rows` VARCHAR (5),
`fields_cols` VARCHAR (5),
`fields_fit_to_window` VARCHAR (10),
`fields_use_fullOnly` VARCHAR (10),
`fields_print_photos` VARCHAR (20),
`fields_use_exif` VARCHAR (10),
`fields_parentAlbumName` VARCHAR (100),
`fields_clicks` INT (10) UNSIGNED,
`fields_clicks_date` INT (15) UNSIGNED,
`fields_display_clicks` VARCHAR (10),
`fields_public_comments` VARCHAR (10),
`fields_serial_number` INT (10) UNSIGNED,
`fields_name` VARCHAR (100),
`fields_last_mod_time` INT (15) UNSIGNED,
`fields_background` VARCHAR (100),
`fields_owner` VARCHAR (100),
PRIMARY KEY(`gaid`),
UNIQUE(`gaid`)
) TYPE=MyISAM;

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `gallery_image`;
CREATE TABLE `gallery_image` (
`giid` INT (20) UNSIGNED AUTO_INCREMENT,
`name` VARCHAR (100),
`type` VARCHAR (10),
`width` VARCHAR (10),
`height` VARCHAR (10),
`resizedName` VARCHAR (100),
`thumb_x` VARCHAR (10),
`thumb_y` VARCHAR (10),
`thumb_width` VARCHAR (10),
`thumb_height` VARCHAR (10),
`raw_width` VARCHAR (10),
`raw_height` VARCHAR (10),
`version` INT (5) UNSIGNED,
PRIMARY KEY(`giid`),
UNIQUE(`giid`)
) TYPE=MyISAM;

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `gallery_comments`;
CREATE TABLE `gallery_comments` (
`gcid` INT (20) UNSIGNED AUTO_INCREMENT,
`gaiid` INT (15) UNSIGNED,
`commentText` TEXT,
`datePosted` VARCHAR (20),
`IPNumber` VARCHAR (20),
`name` VARCHAR (100),
`UID` VARCHAR (50),
PRIMARY KEY(`gcid`),
UNIQUE(`gcid`)
) TYPE=MyISAM;

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `gallery_photos`;
CREATE TABLE `gallery_photos` (
`gpid` INT (15) UNSIGNED AUTO_INCREMENT,
`gpa_index` INT (10) UNSIGNED,
`gaiid` INT (11) UNSIGNED,
`gaid` INT (11) UNSIGNED,
PRIMARY KEY(`gpid`),
UNIQUE(`gpid`)
) TYPE=MyISAM;

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `gallery_albumitem`;
CREATE TABLE `gallery_albumitem` (
`gaiid` INT (15) UNSIGNED AUTO_INCREMENT,
`caption` VARCHAR (100),
`hidden` VARCHAR (10),
`highlight` TINYINT(1),
`isAlbumName` VARCHAR (10),
`clicks` INT (10),
`keywords` VARCHAR (100),
`uploadDate` INT (15),
`ICD_seconds` INT (3),
`ICD_minutes` INT (3),
`ICD_hours` INT (3),
`ICD_mday` VARCHAR (3),
`ICD_wday` VARCHAR (3),
`ICD_mon` VARCHAR (3),
`ICD_year` VARCHAR (5),
`ICD_yday` VARCHAR (5),
`ICD_weekday` VARCHAR (10),
`ICD_month` VARCHAR (20),
`ICD_0` VARCHAR (15),
`exifData` VARCHAR (200),
`thumbnail` INT (11) UNSIGNED,
`highlightImage` INT (11) UNSIGNED,
`image` INT (11) UNSIGNED,
PRIMARY KEY(`gaiid`),
UNIQUE(`gaiid`)
) TYPE=MyISAM;
</TD></TR></TABLE><!-- BBCode End -->

I had also somehow completely missed the permission array. I have that incorporated now. I would really appreciate some help with coding the save function. It should be very easy as I have already done the load and mapped the object structure and the sql structure. If anyone would like to help or just take a look at the code for the new load function please email me at (richard at benfield dot ws).

Thanks,
Richard