[darcyb]

I had a table full of categorized link items already and wanted to migrate it into Links 1.51 so that it could become the foundation of my collection. It was a duplicated system up to this point where people would use a forum for URL discussion and I was manually updating a table with phpmyadmin. Anyway, this solution fixes all that.

So I wrote my own php script to import the stuff and I figured I'd share it here in case anyone else has to do something similar.

1. First, use the Links interface to create enough categories to match the ones you were using before;
2. Then, run a script sort of like the one I've included before to get the toc and linkslinks tables populated with stuff. I used a counter for the key indices and ignored whatever indices I had. I made my items query from newest to oldest (using whatever key IDs I had), as I didn't want to populate Links with older links at the top of pages. I used my own user account for the userid, and a datestamp from a manual link entry to generate the integer for the time.
3. Although I did notice Links recount how many items were in each category and update the Category records while testing and clicking around, I did it manually anyway by querying (through phpmyadmin) with WHERE catid='n' (cat number) or whatever to get a count for how many items had imported into each category.
4. Edit category records and insert the actual count of items imported for each.

All of this is a sloppy way of doing it and it shows that I'm a little new to all this. I couldn't get phpmyadmin to generate a CSV file while escaping the commas in my news article quotes, and it was tricking imports into thinking a grammatical comma was defining a new field, and it just wouldn't work.

I then had trouble with apostrophes from words like can't, so I had to use the addslashes() function on the titles and descriptions I was importing.

But it worked, and very well. I was able to populate Links with about 400 links, all into the right categories. Here's the ugly amateurish php script with some extra echo commands I used for testing. You can omit those:

<?php					
				
$link_id = mysql_connect("localhost", "username", "password");
	
$result=mysql_list_dbs($link_id);
	
mysql_select_db("dbase_name", $link_id);
	
$result=mysql_query("SELECT * FROM tbl_news where newsType in ('Media', 'Research', 'Opinion', 'Inspiration') order by newsID desc", $link_id);
	
if($result) {
	$idx_count=0;
	while($query_data=mysql_fetch_row($result)){
					
		$idx_count++;
					
		echo "IDX = $idx_count<br>";
					
		if ($query_data[2]=="Media")
			$catid=1;
		if ($query_data[2]=="Research")
			$catid=3;
		if ($query_data[2]=="Opinion")
			$catid=4;
		if ($query_data[2]=="Inspiration")
			$catid=5;
		echo "$query_data[2] catid=$catid<br>";
					
		$result2=mysql_query("INSERT local_linksltoc SET 
			ltoc='',
			linkid='$idx_count',
			catid='$catid',
			displayorder='$idx_count'", $link_id);
			echo "$idx_count, $catid, $idx_count<br>";
					
			$query_data[3]=addslashes($query_data[3]);
			$query_data[4]=addslashes($query_data[4]);
					
			$result3=mysql_query("INSERT local_linkslink SET
				linkid='$idx_count',
				linkname='$query_data[3]', // newsTitle field
				linkdesc='$query_data[4]',  // newsBody field
				linkurl='$query_data[5]',    // newsURL field
				linkhits='0',
				linkforum='-999',
				linkcheck='1108148258',   // whatever is "now"
				linkstatus='1',
				linkdate='1108148258',    // whatever is "now"
				linkusername='username',
				linkuserid='1',                   // my userid
				linkmoderate='0',
				linkmoddate='0',
				linkreviewfreq='0'", $link_id);
			if ($result3==1)
				echo "$idx_count, $query_data[3], $query_data[4], $query_data[5]<br><hr><br>";
			else
				echo "<h1>$idx_count - $query_data[3] - ERROR</h1>";
	}
}
mysql_close($link_id);				
?>

Hope this is useful to somebody.

Attached are FROM (the original news/links database) and TO (Links 1.51) screen caps.