Some remarks regarding the implementation of a new address-book:
Quoting ACS's address-book documentation:
"This module, which contains nothing remotely fancy, has lots of room for
improvement, for instance, categorization of people (personal vs. business) or other ways
of browsing records. It also should have ways to share records in the standard ACS way:
public, group, and private ownership."
As a matter of fact, a first data model has been created for a 'fancy' address book. (For
the moment, this exists only in M$ Access format (sorry).) In the first place, it is
capable of distinguishing between persons and organizations. This is done through the
table 'relations'. Secondly, it can distinguish between roles that these relations can
play (which may overlap). E.g. customers, vendors, employees. Thirdly, address and
telephone data is maintained through the Relations Table. The Relations Table is linked to the
following tables:
e-mail addresses
website addresses
visiting addresses
mail addresses
home phone numbers
work phone numbers
mobile phone numbers
home fax numbers
work fax numbers
Because of this structure, there is no restriction to the amount of e-mail addresses
that the database can contain, since the database is fully normalized. Integrity is
maintained up to a certain level.
If anyone is interested in the model, please e-mail
me. I will present the data-model here
next week (so it will be accessible by anybody). Information about it can be found here.
Is there anybody around capable of porting a model like this to SQL and TCL? I guess an
address-book like this is a valuable enhancement of existing functionality.
