refactoring.txt

Refactoring the OP
==================

The biggest problem with the OP system is that there is a vast amount of mostly
duplicated code. We need to pull that out into common code, and probably just fewer
files.

The following pages are all just variants of "list the OP for a group of people":
-- op_ind: awards for a person, by ID
-- op_march: awards for a number of people by ID, in order of march
-- op_name: awards for people, based on first letter
-- group_op: awards for everyone in a branch (inconsistent, and pretty poorly factored)

Available tools that we can use for refactoring (and improving security):
-- Views (possibly good for introducing, eg, the caitlin_number, and collecting the
   info about a list of recognitions with all the joins)
-- Prepared statements
-- Stored procedures and functions

Note that PHP does support fetching full result sets from stored procedures, which
is likely to be handy. The relevant calls are real_query() and multi_query().

It seems like the most obvious place to start is with Views. There is likely a big,
nasty, prejoined View that we can use to get all of the recognitions.

Note that op_ind should be the key basis, since I've already begun to improve the
SQL query there.

==================
Functional Changes
==================