Documentation for the Vbulletin Database Schema?
 

Is there documentation that can tell a developer what each column in a table does?

For example, what does the "dateline" column in the vb_thread table store? Is it using Unix time? Not all columns seem to be named so that their purpose is obvious.

Thanks.

"dateline" is pretty self-explanatory. It stores the time the thread was created as a UNIX timestamp.

Thank you for that.

I would argue that it isn't that self explanatory for someone who isn't used to the vBulletin way of doing things. Do I take that as a "no", that there isn't documentation for this?

Well, you just have to experiment with things to see how they work. That's how I got to know vBulletin.

I do not know of any documentation and have never seen anyone talk about seeing any documentation for this either.

Just check the scripts, if vBulletin fetches data from the database it will normally have the column as the array key for that piece of data (if it is in an array). When vBulletin is setting data it normally uses the column names as the value for the HTML name="..." attribute on the form inputs.

You just have to look around and see what is going on. You could also just set up a test installation and check out the contents of the database, once you know what data is stored just find the corresponding data which is displayed.

Alright, I just thought there might have been an easier way to figure this all out. Some of the columns aren't returning the results I expected when I am querying them directly.

Thanks for the pointers.

there is a way to ask for documentation, on the official website... here is a site for modifications... most of the guys that are modding here are aware of the protocols, or at least try to read the code before the panic... you can't expect to work for vBulletin if you have no idea of how PHP works... dateline is self-explanatory for me, as it's a general term in php for unix-dateline