Write file to disk problem

[boneill]

Hi All,

I am trying to add an RSS feed to my site by following the instructions in issue 30 of Practical Web Projects. (UK Magazine)

All seems okay except that writing the rdf file to disk is failing, which may be a problem with file permissions in IIS.

I have turned on Read and Write permissions, and have tried various paths including $DOCUMENT_ROOT (set in php.ini), but no joy.

The relevant function is as follows:

[FONT=Courier New]function getFeed($feed, $feedname, $no) {
global $aDisplay, $numRows;
$numRows =$no;
$tmp = "$DOCUMENT_ROOT/mcm/".$feedname."_tmp.rdf";
$expires = time()-3600;
if (!file_exists($tmp) or filemtime($tmp) < $expires) {
@copy($feed, $tmp) or die("File copy to temp file failed");
}
$xml = "";
$filehandle = @fopen($tmp, "r") or die ("Cannot open temporary file");
while(!feof($filehandle)) {
$xml.= fread($filehandle,4096);
}
fclose($filehandle);
$xmlparser = xml_parser_create();
@xml_set_element_handler($xmlparser, "datahandler");
@xml_parse($xmlparser, $xml) or die("Error parsing data file");
xml_parser_free($xmlparser);
return $aDisplay;
}[/FONT]
The code dies with "File copy to temp file failed".

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Brendan

[LoganK]

In IIS, you need to also configure the directory permissions that you're writing to. I assume you're running WinXP pro or Win2000; if you're running WinXP Home, you'll need to reboot in safe mode and login as an administrator before you follow these steps:

1. Right-click the directory you need to save files to.
2. Click "Properties"
3. Click the "Security" tab.
4. Click "Advanced".
5. Make sure "Inherit permissions" is unchecked (if it is checked, uncheck it, and, when prompted, click remove).
6. Click "OK". Now you're back at the "Security" tab.
7. Click "Add".
8. Type in the names of the users you want access to that directory, seperated by semicolons. The one that is crucial to PHP is this: IUSR<computername>. That's the user PHP runs as. So if the computer name is "server01", the user would be: IUSR_server01. I also usually include "system", and "administrators", so my final group is this: SYSTEM; Administrators; IUSR<computername>.
9. Click "Ok" or "Add" (forgot which one it is). Windows will add all of them to the security tab.
10. On each one, check "Full Control" in the permissions box. Click "Apply", then "OK".

Run your PHP script!

[boneill]

Apologies for the delay - holiday mode <off> 🙁

I'm on XP Pro, but in standalone mode, hence no 'Security' tab on 'Properties' dialogue. Turned off Simple Security, and it appeared. Made the changes you suggested, but no joy. Damn!

Looking at the code though, I don't understand why it needs to create a file at all. Why can it not just pull the feed data live and display it?

The code to retrieve and display the RSS data is as follows:

<?php
  $a = getFeed("http://www.spacetoday.net/summaries.rdf","spacetoday", 5);
  if (is_array($a)) {
  foreach($a as $row) { ?>
  <li><a href="<?php echo $row['link']; ?>"><?php echo $row['title']; ?></a> - <?php echo $row['description']; ?></li>
  <?php
  	}
}
?>

This doesn't appear to reference the local file at all, even if it was being created.

I'm puzzled...