Forum OpenACS Development: Extending User Properties

What is the best, most elegant, way to extend user information? I would like to associate multiple additional properties with a user (a person). For example, I want to associate pager and wireless device identifiers and access methods. There may be multiple pagers, multiple cell phones, PDAs, etc and each of these may be a phone number, email address, etc. Possibly even multiple identifiers with associated access methods for each device.

Thanks,

Randy

Hi Randy,

It's certainly not the most elegant solution, but we add an extra table which we link to the user table.

I think the idea with the most promise is to use the acs_attributes system to manage attributes and automagically generate forms, etc.  This would require alot of work, but I hope it will find its way into a future OACS release.  Please see this thread for further info:

https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=28086

There are several approaches for this
- ams: https://openacs.org/xowiki/ams
- dynamic types: https://openacs.org/xowiki/dynamic-types
- dynfields (in PO)
- xo dynfields https://gitlab.com/sussdorff/intranet-xotcl-dynfield

i have not used any of these, so i can't say, what's the best for your situation.

Thanks.

I resusciated this thread wondering if there would be a similar and neat solution as cr_item's.

function content_type__create_attribute

After a quick search in the api-doc, I found
api-doc/plsql-subprogram-one?name=acs_attribute__create_attribute&type=FUNCTION

That got me wonder if there would be any acs_object_type__create_attribute ... :)

Thanks Gustaf, for the references of the packages. im_dynfields is indeed a nice and potential solution to my case. It needs a bit testing to get only intranet-core and intranet-dynfields only. I don't want to fork too much of OACS core.

Best wishes,
I

Hi Dave,

If it does the expected, the new column in the table user_preferences should be created, shouldn't it?

I explicity added the argument in the plsql function,

Example:
select acs_attribute__create_attribute(
'user',
'purchased_plan',
'text',
'Purchased Plan',
'Purchased Plans',
'user_preferences',
'purchased_plan',
null,
1,
1,
null,
null,
'f'
);

I believe this is a bug or design oversight from back in the ACS 4.2 days.

The pl/sql functions accept a table_name parameter, but it clearly throws an error if table_name is not null. That does not make sense.

I have a set of changes that allow passing in table name to the function to allow passing in the table name. I can find those and make them available somewhere, if anyone in interested in trying to add that back into OpenACS core.