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+3 votes
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Hello!

I'm starting to look at a deeper integration with Q&A and our existing data. Thanks to the great documentation, user login is perfectly integrated. I was now wondering if you would have any pointer to where to start to use (create/store/view) Categories and Tags from my own DB instead of using Q&A tables? Q&A share the same DB than my main site.

Maybe this could be a new external point, like the emailer and the users.

Thanks!

Mélanie

2 Answers

+1 vote
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Best answer

If you are interested to have that feature, I've sent my modifications and they have been added there:

http://www.question2answer.org/addons.php

With the code in there, you can integrated your categories in the same way than single sign on is integrated. Tags are only used for auto-completion, this seemed enough integration to me. You can be notified when a question is associated to a categories and tags in the proper php file.

+1 vote
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edited by
Hi Mélanie, and welcome!

I think it would be a pretty major code change to integrate the categories and tags via a single database table, because of all the JOINs that Q2A performs based on its expectation of its tables having a certain form.

However you could certainly have your own code modify Q2A's tables, to add tags and categories and the like. Categories are defined in the qa_categories table. Tags don't have their own table, but are set on a per-post basis and then indexed. So you could programatically add a bunch of posts with the tags you wanted, then click the "Reindex..." button in the "Stats" section of the "Admin" panel to index them.
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Thanks gidgreen for that quick answer. Actually, tags and categories already exist in my database in their own format (different tables, quite a complex structure in fact). So I would need to kind of "by pass" the way Q&A works with its categories and tags to use them. I was guessing it couldn't be easy.

You may be right, pushing the data TO Q&A will probably be a lot simpler! I just have to make sure everything stays in synch.
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Just went back to this problem and I just realized that tags from hidden question are not proposed to user. Which post are examined for tags?
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I'm afraid only the tags of visible questions are used for tag suggestions. This is pretty hard to change since it relates to the database contents in several places. So instead I think this would need to be a core code modifications - look for qa_db_popular_tags_selectspec and you'll see when the list of most popular tags is retrieved. You could retrieve something different instead.
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