Drupal Development Blog

The history of the kludge apparently may go back as early as the 1940's.

Every computer programmer is all too familiar with what a kludge is, and how undesirable it is to be a part of one. On the flip side is the importance that software work well and consistently.

Here's what happened.

I wanted to check out the node access module and downloaded the 4.7.x-1.1 release, installing it on my 5.1 system. The reason is that this is the only official release available right now.

After uploading and enabling from the admin >> modules screen I went to configure it, and started getting error messages. I tried uninstalling from the admin screen but still had problems, so I then went to phpMyAdmin and saw the nodeaccess table was still there. So I dropped it. That's when the errors really started to fly.

Next I downloaded and installed the 5.x-1.x-dev release which is not an official release, but hoped that might straighten things out. It didn't. I installed, then uninstalled. The nodeaccess table still was on my database and there was an error with every click on my site:

user warning: Table 'faceup2i_drpl1.node_access' doesn't exist
query: SELECT COUNT(*) FROM node_access WHERE nid = 0 AND ((gid = 0 AND realm = 'all')) AND grant_view >= 1 in /home/faceup2i/public_html/drupal/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 172.

Not good. Can't have this type of stuff showing up everytime someone clicks over to my website. Looking in the code of the MySQL include file I tinkered around a bit and ended up wrapping this little if statement around the code that was printing the error:

// override nodeaccess table related errors 2007-08-06 M. Landman
if ( ! preg_match ("/node_access/i", $query) ) {
trigger_error(check_plain(mysql_error($active_db) ."\nquery: ". $query), E_USER_WARNING);
return FALSE;
}