DPL:Manual - DPL parameters: Other parameters

goal

goal	set the overall goal for DPL to either show pages (default) or categories these pages belong to

Syntax:

goal=pages | categories

Explanation:

Default is 'pages', which means that DPL produces a list of pages. And this is exactly what the name DPL promises.

If you set the goal parameter to 'categories' the list of pages will still be produced but you won´t see it. Instead it will be used to calculate a unique ordered list of all categories these pages belong to.

This allows you to ask a question like: Given all pages that are member of category X with a title matching "y%" and which use template "Z": to which categories do these pages belong?

One of the more useful applications would be question like: "To which categories do the pages belong which contain a reference to the current page?"

The output of "goal=categories" is technically a list of pages of type category. This means that you can use all DPL formatting options (mode=userformat, listseparators, columns etc.) and pseudo variables (%TITLE%, %PAGE%) to customise the layout of your report.

Technical Note:

Due to some limitations in MySQL it is currently not possible to restrict the intermediate result set of pages to a certain maximum (using the LIMIT clause). In addition the generated SQL code is not in all cases optimal (as its structure provides for complex selection criteria and therefore is unnecessarily complex in simple cases). So be careful and apply precise selection criteria.

allowcachedresults

allowcachedresults

allow delivery of results based on cached database contents.

Syntax:

allowcachedresults=true

Explanation:

Default is FALSE, so normally DPL will disable the parser cache before it produces a result. Disbaling the cache produces some extra server load but guarantees always correct results.

So, if you do not use this parameter you will alwas get a result which is based on the latest changes made on any articles. But in many cases you could have gotten the same result with using less server resources!

If you set 'allowcachedresults=true', the parser cache will be used. That means, your results might be a little bit outdated (usually one hour or so). But there are less resources used on the server side. You might want to experiment with that parameter and check the size of load reduction (i.e. gain in term of response time).

If you allow chached results you can still enforce DPL to produce a correct result via using "&action=purge" in the command line.

debug

debug

Sets debugging level.

Syntax:

debug=n, where n is one of:

• 0 — silent mode, shows nothing
• 1 — quiet mode, shows (fatal) errors
• 2 — default mode, like 1 + shows warnings; — (default)
• 3 — verbose mode, like 2 + shows SQL query.

If you use debug param but not in first position in the DPL element, the new debug settings are not applied before all previous parameters have been parsed and checked. This will generate a warning for debug=2 and above.

Example:

<DPL>
  namespace=Media
  debug=0
  namespace=Special
</DPL>

This list will output the error for the first namespace: Media is not a valid namespace value (pseudo-namespace). Assuming you haven't changed the default debug value (2), you will also get a warning: debug=1 is not input first (before namespace=Media). So it did not apply to namespace=Media but only to what's after. Indeed, you won't get the warning for the second namespace (Special) since debug=0 changed debug settings to silent mode.

DPL debug messages are translatable in DynamicPageList2.i18n.php. See also #Internationalization.