MiniVend, as with most powerful shopping cart programs, is all about databases.
NOTE: No other database besides MiniVend's internal one is needed. You may find that keeping your database in an SQL manager makes it easier to integrate MiniVend with other tools. MiniVend is fully buzzword-equipped, but if you just want to maintain a spreadsheet with your product information, you can ignore the references to SQL, DBI, DBD, and all of those other things and just modify the file products.asc appropriately.
This version of MiniVend implements the database in GDBM, DB_File, SQL, or in-memory format. If you have DBM, large catalogs can be used without using too much memory. The DBM files are built automatically when they change, from the the ASCII source file. If you don't have either GDBM or DB_File, or you set the environment variable MINIVEND_NODBM before starting the server, an in-memory product database will be used. Catalogs of more than, say, 1,000 items will use large amounts of memory.
NOTE: In the following descriptions, we will use the following terms interchangeably:
It is required that the key be the first column of an ASCII source file for GDBM, Berkeley DB, or in-memory built-in database formats. It is also strongly suggested that you keep that practice for SQL databases, since MiniVend's import, export, and search facilities will work much better with that practice.
If necessary, MiniVend reads the data to place in tables from standard ASCII-delimited files. All of these ASCII source files are kept in the products directory, normally products in the catalog directory (where catalog.cfg is).
NOTE: Microsoft Excel is a widely-used tool to maintain MiniVend databases, but has several problems with its standard TAB-delimited export, like encasing fields containing commas in quotes, generating extra carriage returns embedded in records, and not including trailing blank fields. To avoid problems, use a text-qualifier of none.
The ASCII files can have ^M (carriage return) characters if desired, but must have a newline character at the end of the line to work -- Mac users uploading files must use ASCII mode, not binary mode!
MiniVend sets the default ASCII delimiter scheme with the Delimiter directive, which can have one of three settings, TAB, PIPE, or CSV.
IMPORTANT NOTE: The items must be separated by a single delimiter. The items are lined up for your reading convenience.
code description price image
SH543 Men's fine cotton shirt 14.95 shirts.jpg
| characters. No whitespace should be at the beginning of the line.
code|description|price|image
SH543|Men's fine cotton shirt|14.95|shirts.jpg
"code","description","price","image"
"SH543","Men's fine cotton shirt","14.95","shirts.jpg"
NOTE: Using the default TAB delimiter is highly recommended if you are planning on searching the ASCII source file of the database. PIPE works fairly well, but CSV delimiter schemes cause problems with searching.
The Delimiter directive sets the default scheme, and should be set to one of those three values. TAB is the default scheme.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Field names are usually case-sensitive. Unless you are consistent in the names, you will have problems. All lower or all upper case names are recommended.
MiniVend uses one mandatory database, the products database. It is by
default identified as products and the
ASCII source is kept in the file products.asc in the products directory. This file is also the default file for searching
with the THE SEARCH ENGINE.
MiniVend also has a number of standard but optional databases, some of which are in fixed special formats:
[item-accessories] or [accessories code] tags. This is a fixed-format database, and must be created as specified.
See Accessories. The big advantage of this database is speed -- it is always retained in
memory. If you have a large number (many thousands) of items, use an Arbitrary Database instead.