NineChime forum

Although $OekakiU and $OekakiPass are always handled in boot.php for every entry point, there are many different ways that those two variables are initialized before boot.php filters them.

This is a bit of a problem, because the design of OekakiPoteto requires a username to be specified before drawing begins, and that username is sent to the board when the picture is submitted.  Then, the board will redirect to the comment screen by looking for the most recent drawing made by that member.  Without a username, a lot of things don't work properly and things tend to disappear.  Another problem is that the applet redirect has to be hard-coded, so it's not possible for the board to send a picture number to the applet, and then the applet would redirect to the appropriate picture.  It would be necessary to send a coded hash to the applet, which could then be decoded by the comment screen to make the match, and then discarded.  Making such matches isn't easy.  This is precisely why older oekaki boards, such as OekakiBBS, just submit pictures, and it was assumed that the first person to comment on the picture was the artist, which is a really lousy way of doing things!

I assume the way you'd like this to work is that after a drawing is submitted, someone would enter their name, so everyone knows who drew what picture.  Passwords and the like aren't required.  If so, the coded hash method is probably the best compromise, but I'd have to think about which stable hash would be ideal.  A truncated microtime stamp would probably do the trick, since security wouldn't be critical.

If you only need to have all the pictures sent under the same username, you'd just have to register a single account, then modify boot.php so the name and password are always used.  For Wax 5.6.1, that begins on line 121:

if (!isset ($OekakiU) && !isset ($OekakiPass)) {
    $OekakiU    = '';
    $OekakiPass = '';
    if (isset ($_COOKIE['OekakiU']) && isset ($_COOKIE['OekakiPass'])) {
        $OekakiU    = $_COOKIE['OekakiU'];
        $OekakiPass = $_COOKIE['OekakiPass'];
    }
}

A start would be to always log in with the account you've created, so replace the above with this:

// Force login
{
    $my_account_name = 'name';

    $OekakiU = addslashes ($my_account);
    $result = mysql_query ("SELECT usrpass FROM {$OekakiPoteto_MemberPrefix}oekaki WHERE usrname='{$OekakiU}'");
    if ($result) {
        // Get the properly encrypted password from the database
        $OekakiPass = mysql_result ($result, 0);
    } else {
        // Database error.  We can't do much except refresh
        exit ('Please click the refresh button on your web browser');
    }
}

That should always log in the account automatically, and thus transmit all the proper info to the applets, unless I missed something.  Be aware that with this hack, only one person may draw at a time, or you'll have a lot of pictures showing up in the recovery bin, and you'll be "locked out" of the admin account for recovering them.

In a nutshell I just need to know how to get ahold of the image variable. I know how to upload images using php and mysql I just don't know how to "grab" the image from shipainter.

protocol doesn't support output SendE

When you send image data to the server, the script has to return a confirmation that it received the data correctly.  If the applet gets no confirmation, you will get this error.

There's quite a few things missing in that code you posted.  For starters:

<param name="url_save" value="shiget.php" />
<param name="url_exit" value="comment.php" />

ShiPainter sends the data to "url_save", and if it receives the confirmation code, it will redirect to "url_exit".  The actual picture number is never sent to the applet, so when the applet redirects, you have to search for the last picture posted by the artist.  That's why if you set up a board without a login, only one person can use the board at a time.  Otherwise, there's no way to tell which picture is which.

...also note:

<param name="image_canvas" value="<?php echo '$picture'; ?>" />

Here, you either have to get rid of the apostrophes, or use double quotes for the $picture variable to parse as expected.  Apostrophes tell PHP to treat the string as a literal, so it will actually print '$picture' instead of the value of the variable.  Double quotes tell PHP to parse the string and replace variable names with their values.  Putting curley brackets around variables helps clear up confusion:

RIGHT:
echo ('My name is' . $name);
echo ("My name is $name");
echo ("My name is {$name}");

WRONG:
echo ('My name is $name');
echo ('My name is {$name}');

In a nutshell I just need to know how to get ahold of the image variable.

Unfortunately, none of the applets use forms to upload files (as they should), so a lot of frustrating things happen.  First, getting cookies is a pain, but thankfully you don't have to deal with that.  Second, you can't just read a variable from the applet.  You have to read standard input (the entire chunk of data sent by the applet), and then break it up into smaller pieces.  ShiPainter formats its data with a header which tells you how big each piece is, and how many pieces there are.  All the code to do this is in shiget.php.

// Get raw POST data (reference test saves memory)
if (empty ($HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA)) {
    $raw_buffer = file_get_contents ('php://input');
} else {
    $raw_buffer =& $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA;
}

// ShiBBS data
if (substr ($raw_buffer, 0, 1) == 'S') {
    // Image data
    $image['o_length'] = substr ($raw_buffer, $image['h_length'] + 9, 8);
    $image['o_length'] = (int) $image['o_length'];
    $image['o_data']   = substr ($raw_buffer, $image['h_length'] + 19, $image['o_length']);

    // Animation
    $image['t_length'] = substr ($raw_buffer, $image['h_length'] + $image['o_length'] + 19, 8);
    $image['t_length'] = (int) $image['t_length'];
    $image['t_data']   = substr ($raw_buffer, $image['h_length'] + $image['o_length'] + 27, $image['t_length']);

    // Thumbnail
    $image['t2_length'] = substr ($raw_buffer, $image['h_length'] + $image['o_length'] + $image['t_length'] + 27, 8);
    $image['t2_length'] = (int) $image['t2_length'];
    $image['t2_data']   = substr ($raw_buffer, $image['h_length'] + $image['o_length'] + $image['t_length'] + 35, $image['t2_length']);
}

In this code, standard input is read and put or referenced into the variable "$raw_buffer".  The picture data is put into "$image['o_data']", the animation data into "$image['t_data']", and the thumbnail into "$image['t2_data']".  Please note that picture data is always sent, but animation and thumbnail data require you to provide some extra applet parameters to enable them.

Once this data is parsed and saved, and the database has been updated, you need to send the confirmation to the applet to let it know that the upload was successful.  The "print_ok()" and "quiet_exit()" functions show the proper format.  If you send nothing, the applet will complain.  If you send anything without the "text/plain" MIME type, the applet will simply print that to the screen (and very poorly, too).

I'll have to help out with the code cleanup and database stuff tomorrow.  Right now, it's time for bed. 

That's good.  It's easy to look at existing code. 

As far as the database is concerned, that can be difficult.  There's a lot of things you have to think about when getting/sending data to the database, and setting up the database is the hardest part.  Then again, if you're using this code for your own purposes, you don't have to worry about making the code as generic and portable as possible, which is a big help.

A thought just hit me about the artist name, database thing. I can use php to generate a random string of characters to pass to the database as the username. There won't be any retuouches or safety saves, but we won't be needing them anyway.

OK, we've got several problems, here.

First, you don't really have to modify the shiget.php code.  The value of $OekakiU and $OekakiPass are retrieved from the applet with this code:

$OekakiU    = addslashes (utf8_decode ($params['usr']));
$OekakiPass = addslashes ($params['vcode']);

What this means is that the applet will send an encoded header to the script.  This header is decoded into the $params[] array at the top of the code as an unescaped UTF-8 string.

So long as you have a custom user name and password hard-coded into boot.php, you don't have to worry about changing $OekakiU and $OekakiPass in any other script.  boot.php takes care of all that, and passes the values to the applets automatically.

Server returned HTTP response code: 403 for URL: http://servername/dir/getpic.cgi

Well, there's no "getpic.cgi" file to be found!  We're not using a Perl script (the "cgi" file extension), we're using PHP. 

Also note that boot.php handles the database connection, so if you fail to include that, you can't insert the picture, and there's database code in shiget.php that MUST be left intact.  Quite simply, this code isn't usable, because there's too much missing.

It's actually quite tricky to change the code so guests can type in their names.  OekakiPoteto wasn't designed with that in mind, and it's something I'll have to think about with my next board.

Really, it's functions.php, comment.php, and paintsave.php that require modification to do what you need.  The hard part is forcing a login so people can draw, but shadowing the login when they post a comment, so the board thinks that person is a guest, and therefore, their name is requested.

See, I'm not sure how sophisticated it should be if it's a "special needs" board.  Do these children have specific visual or physical disabilities that makes it hard for them to type or read small text?  If so, changing the templates would be a big help on top of code changes.

Sorry, but during the week I don't have much time to help out.  If you can tell me a bit more about the procedure you'd like for people to draw, I can hack up some code for you on the weekend that might give you a better idea of what's going on when a picture is submitted.

I don't know what happened, the whole thing self destructed this morning. I've had to start completely over.

Sorry for the wait.  It's been hectic this week at work before my vacation.  But, I have this week off, so after I get some sleep, I'll see what I can do for you.  I spent all night getting art done. 

The short of it is that you'll have to have a modified version of the board that is aware of guests.  You don't really need to make too many changes to the applet parsing code, but you DO have to make changes to the authorization system and the comment system.