On 2005-11-29, I suggested a patch to search to allow search to create a block listing recent searches.

Ensuing discussion on #drupal and on the patch page suggested that:

• the idea was interesting
• the implementation was too fragile to be used as such

I looked deeper into this and I think that making this feature more resilient would involve changing watchdog. The idea is therefore as follows

• add a new column (say, “data”) to the watchdog table, to hold a php serialized content, or NULL
• modify bootstrap.inc/watchdog to pass a new parameter:

<php> function watchdog(

$type, 
$message, 
$severity = WATCHDOG_NOTICE, 
$link = NULL,
$data = NULL) {</php>

The new parameter could be used by modules aware of this new feature to store content of their choice in the watchdog along with the standard parameters, while retaining compatibility with existing call through the use of a default NULL.

• adding a new hook_watchdog_render to be invoked from watchdog.module/watchdog_overview to allow modules to display custom content along with or in lieu of the default log display. It would likely take the same parameters as the new watchdog() function:
• adding a setting to watchdog to toggle display of this additional information:
  • not displayed
  • displayed along the standard information
  • displayed as a link to details in the default watchdog display

In the current 4.6.x core, only watchdog module queries the watchdog table, and does so with queries like:

SELECT w.* [...] FROM {watchdog} w

, which means no outside modules should be impacted. These queries could be improved to avoid querying this additional column if it is not needed.