One of the sites I'm working on generates many of the forms used in
the user interface. I've added a column to the acs_datatypes table
called simpletype_p. I set the value to true if it's a simple type
and f if it's an acs object. This allows me to put objects as
attributes of other objects. This allows simple datatypes to be
grouped into objects and objects plus simple types to be grouped into
more complex objects. It also allows acs_objects to represent xml
documents since the acs object model maps very closly to XML schemas.
An example could be a contact. This object could now be represented as
| Attr Name | type | min | max |
| firstname | string | 0 | 100 |
| lastname | string | 0 | 100 |
| address | address | 0 | null |
This would allow 1 firstname up to 100 chars 1 lastname up to 100
chars and 0 or more addresses to be stored in a countact object
I've found this addition to the data model to be very usful but was
never succesful in getting it into the arsdigita version. Does anyone
else think this would be usefull and what are the chances of adding
it to openacs?
