OVERVIEW
--------

This directory contains several patches for the PHP 4.4.7 and 5.2.0
sybase-ct modules. These patches can be applied to the ext/sybase_ct
directory of a PHP 4.4.7 (or 5.2.0) distribution, and then enabled with
--with-sybase-ct=$SYBASE

I wrote these patches because I was forced to work with both PHP and
Sybase, a fact which nearly caused me to lose my sanity. I hope you
are able to keep yours.

Also, if you find these patches useful, please help me by petitioning
for their acceptance in the mainstream PHP codebase:

https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=41190

Please note that PHP 4.x is deprecated and therefore I've done no
testing to make sure that these patches work in their current form
against the current stable version (4.4.9) of the 4.x branch.
They worked with 4.4.7; that's all I'm willing to say on the subject.

PATCHES
-------

The available patches are:

php-sybase_ct.v15.patch
-----------------------
Adds the correct link libraries to the Sybase build procedure. Only use
this if your build is complaining about missing libraries during the link
phase.

See http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.sybase.php#76954 for more discussion
of alternative approaches to make PHP work with Sybase 15.

php-sybase_ct.hostname.patch:
-----------------------------
Corrects (IMO) the behavior of sybct.hostname to default to the hostname of
the current system. It also supports {HOSTNAME} as a substitution variable
in the sybct.hostname parameter, in case you want to decorate the default
value with additional information.

php-sybase_ct.return_status-and-output_params.patch
---------------------------------------------------
Adds the sybase_return_status and sybase_output_params functions.

Note that in both functions, the input parameter "$result" is 
understood to be the return value from the sybase_query() function,
e.g.

$result = sybase_query($sql);

The functions behave as follows:

(o) sybase_return_status ($result) - returns the value of the
    last 'return' statement that occured in the call to sybase_query()
    that returned <result>.  In theory there could be more than one
    return statement, if for example your SQL statement called two
    stored procedures that both call return. You wouldn't be silly
    enough to do that, would you?

    Anyway, the return value of sybase_return_status is an integer.
    It is set to FALSE if no return value was set during the last call
    and 0 if the return value was zero. The return value will only
    be set if a stored procedure was called, but NOTE that any call
    to a stored procedure will result in an implicit return value
    of 0, even if no RETURN statement occurs in the stored procedure.
    This is a "feature" of Sybase, not this patch.

(o) sybase_output_params ($result) - returns a hash (associative
    array) of output parameter names and values that were processed
    during the call to sybase_query() that produced <result>. So this
    looks like

    array (
        @output_param1 => 'an output value',
        @output_param2 => 17,
        ...
    )

    Just use list() and each() to iterate through the hash like
    you would with any hash in PHP. 

    The return value will be false if there were no output 
    parameters returned from the SQL statement. Thus your
    flow control can look like this

        if( $output_params = sybase_output_params($result) ) {
            // handle processing ...
        }

    and be meaningful.

TESTING
-------

Once you've applied these patches to your PHP source tree and have
installed your newly patched module, you can test the new functionality
as follows:

1. Run the included SQL file to create a stored procedure that will
exercise the new functionality:

isql -S SERVER -U user -P password -i testing.sql

2. Copy the attached file testing.php into your document root and then
modify it to include your server, username, and password. Then visit
it with a web browser and verify that you can load the page OK.