Hydra — Data Analytics Workbench (HDAW)

A web-based campaign data management, ETL pipeline, and reporting platform for advertising and media agencies. Built on PHP with a custom scripting language — H-Script (also called ALCODE) — that lets analysts write client-specific data-loading, transformation, and reporting pipelines without writing PHP directly.

The live demo is at hydradp.io.

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Components

Component	Description
HDAWCodeRoot/HDAWCodeRoot/	Core PHP web application — UI, profile management, scheduler, views
HDAWCodeRoot/HDACron/	Windows .NET service that drives scheduled H-Script profile execution
HDAWCodeRoot/HDAWCronProcess/	PHP cron endpoint (HDA_cron.php)
HDAWCodeRoot/HDAWSoapProcess/	SOAP endpoint for external integrations (HDA_soap_accept.php)

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H-Script / ALCODE

H-Script is Hydra's built-in ETL scripting language. Scripts (.hc files) run as "profiles" — triggered on a schedule, on file upload, by manual trigger from the web UI, or by another profile.

Typical use cases:

• Pulling data files via FTP/SFTP
• Parsing and loading records into SQL Server or MySQL
• Running SQL queries and generating HTML/PDF reports
• Emailing results and alerts between teams

Full language documentation is in Hydra_Docs/, including syntax references for loops, case expressions, state machines, file management, triggers, and events.

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Tech Stack

• PHP 7+ — application server
• SQL Server (primary, via sqlsrv driver) or MySQL (via mysqli)
• Windows Server — required for the HDACron .NET companion service
• Standard web server (Apache / IIS)

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Setup

Requirements

• PHP 7+ with sqlsrv (SQL Server) or mysqli (MySQL) extension
• A SQL Server or MySQL database
• Write access to tmp/, ErrorLogs/, and cache/ directories (created automatically on first run)

Steps

1. Copy HDAWCodeRoot/HDAWCodeRoot/ to your web server document root (or a subdirectory).
2. Create cfg/alc_init.cfg from the provided example:

   cp cfg/alc_init.cfg.example cfg/alc_init.cfg
   

3. Edit cfg/alc_init.cfg and fill in your database connection details, email settings, and IMAP credentials.
4. Access the application at:

   HDAW.php?load=HDA_Enter&root=HDAWCodeRoot&home=<your-profile-name>
   

Note: The cfg/alc_init.cfg file contains credentials and is excluded from version control via .gitignore. Never commit it.

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Project Layout

Hydra/
├── HDAWCodeRoot/
│   ├── HDAWCodeRoot/       PHP web application
│   │   ├── cfg/
│   │   │   └── alc_init.cfg.example   Configuration template
│   │   ├── Classes/        PHP class library
│   │   ├── Scripts/        Client-side JavaScript
│   │   ├── css/            Stylesheets
│   │   ├── Images/         UI assets
│   │   ├── templates/      Output templates
│   │   └── HDA_*.php       Core modules
│   ├── HDACron/            .NET Windows cron service
│   ├── HDAWCronProcess/    PHP cron endpoint
│   └── HDAWSoapProcess/    PHP SOAP endpoint
└── Hydra_Docs/
    ├── H-ScriptCore/       H-Script language documentation (PDFs)
    └── H-ScriptCodeSummary.docx

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Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Please open an issue before submitting a pull request for non-trivial changes so the direction can be agreed first.

Areas where help is most valuable:

• Migrating SQL queries to use parameterised statements (currently raw string concatenation)
• Improving session security (session fixation, cookie handling)
• PHP modernisation (moving away from globals, adding type declarations)
• MySQL backend parity with the SQL Server backend
• Documentation and worked H-Script examples

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License

GPL-3.0 — see LICENSE.