Forum OpenACS Development: Re: Group membership

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5: Re: Group membership (response to 4)
Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
I think the issue here is not so much contacts, though that is where things come from, but for me asking the question why a thing (e.g. group membership) is designed in a certain way where it does not make much sense.

We already had at least one example where OpenACS arbitrarily restricts to users instead of parties. This is another example. My question is why?

We do have the concept of parties. Why do we still have so many foreign key constraints on users (where persons would do for natural persons, not all persons need to be users of the system, otherwise, why the distinction) or persons (where the assumption was made only a person would be able to do something where it actually is a party, permissions being a prime example for me).

Therefore, if we do the research into the toolkit we should be aware of the goals. And my goal is to make sure to only restrict to users / persons where it makes a lot of sense to only allow users / persons. Otherwise use parties.

Here is a small list only on acs-core after a quick look into the toolkit:

a) user_preferences table. Should be party_preferences as this definitely refers to a party with a locale, timezone, email_type and dont_spam_me flag. Remember a party can be any of "person" "organization" "group".

b) email_images. E-Mail belongs to a party! Why people are still limiting things related to e-mail to users is a total mystery to me. But I agree at that point in time I did not have enough experience to recognize the significance of it.

c) I would prefer party_portraits (after all an organization has a logo and a person has a portrait as well), but that is maybe only my taste

d) group membership on persons instead of parties (see above)

Again, there is absolutely no need to make this about contacts. For contacts we have 1) and if 1) is not enough we can just overwrite existing procedures (in contacts-init.tcl).