Added "preference" method, for fetching a single value from

systempreferences (which is all most scripts need).

diff --git a/C4/Context.pm b/C4/Context.pm
index 04ab904..f1b4726 100644 (file)
--- a/C4/Context.pm
+++ b/C4/Context.pm
@@ -291,10 +291,46 @@ sub config
        return $context->{"config"}{$var};
 }
 
+=item preference
+
+  $sys_preference = C4::Context->preference("some_variable");
+
+Looks up the value of the given system preference in the
+systempreferences table of the Koha database, and returns it. If the
+variable is not set, or in case of error, returns the undefined value.
+
+=cut
+#'
+# FIXME - The preferences aren't likely to change over the lifetime of
+# the script (and things might break if they did change), so perhaps
+# this function should cache the results it finds.
+sub preference
+{
+       my $self = shift;
+       my $var = shift;                # The system preference to return
+       my $retval;                     # Return value
+       my $dbh = C4::Context->dbh;     # Database handle
+       my $sth;                        # Database query handle
+
+       # Look up systempreferences.variable==$var
+       $retval = $dbh->selectrow_array(<<EOT);
+               SELECT  value
+               FROM    systempreferences
+               WHERE   variable='$var'
+               LIMIT   1
+EOT
+       return $retval;
+}
+
 # AUTOLOAD
 # This implements C4::Config->foo, and simply returns
 # C4::Context->config("foo"), as described in the documentation for
 # &config, above.
+
+# FIXME - Perhaps this should be extended to check &config first, and
+# then &preference if that fails. OTOH, AUTOLOAD could lead to crappy
+# code, so it'd probably be best to delete it altogether so as not to
+# encourage people to use it.
 sub AUTOLOAD
 {
        my $self = shift;