Result format aliases for SMW

Today I’ve wrote a small change to Semantic MediaWiki that adds aliasing supports to it’s result formats. I’ve been working (mainly theorizing) on this for quite a while, and came up with some rather complex solutions, that where not feasible since they required PHP 5.3. The implementation I ended up with is ridiculously easy, and works with an $smwgResultAliases array. This array holds result formats as the keys, and the aliases as (array) value. A simple example of adding aliases using this array is:

$smwgResultAliases[‘googlemaps’] = array(‘googlemap’, ‘gmap’, ‘google’);

Here googlemap, gmap and google will do the same as googlemaps, which is the actual result format. To hold into account these aliases, I only needed to add some simple code to the getResultFormat function in SMWQueryProcessor. This is the code:

	static protected function getResultFormat($params) {
		global $smwgResultAliases;
		
		$format = 'auto';
		if (array_key_exists('format', $params)) {
			$format = strtolower(trim($params['format']));
			global $smwgResultFormats;

			if ( !array_key_exists($format, $smwgResultFormats) ) {
				
				foreach($smwgResultAliases as $mainFormat => $aliases) {
					if (in_array($format, $aliases)) {
						$format = $mainFormat;
						$isAlias = true;
						continue;
					}
				}
				
				if (! $isAlias) $format = 'auto';  // If it is an unknown format, defaults to list/table again
			}
		}
		return $format;
	}

This implementation is fully working with Semantic Maps, and has fixed an issue this extension had with the display of it’s result formats on the special:ask page (see screenshot).

Anyway, my first direct contribution to SMW – yay 🙂