I'm currently on the way of implementing Flexbase (
http://demo.cognovis.de/doc/intranet-dynfield/) for one of our applications. Flexbase is a system to dynamically add attributes to OpenACS, enhancing the existing methods.
As you can see it enhances acs-attributes by a mapping table to map acs-attributes to flexbase widgets. As there is a 1:1 mapping between acs-attributes and flexbase-attributes, I though it might be useful to add the following columns to acs_attributes.
- widget_name: What widget will be used to display this attribute (maybe even overriding the default given in the actual code). Definitely necessary for dynamic attributes.
- deprecated_p: You might not want to delete attributes as valuable information is already stored. But for future editing purposes this attribute is not necessary anymore and should not be displayed.
Two questions:
- What do you think about extending acs_attributes with this information.
- Don and Dave are working on extending acs attributes. There exists dynamic types that does part of the work of Flexbase, so does AMS (e.g. the list concept was taken from there). Having worked with AMS and dynamic types extensibly at cognovís (through contacts and project manager) I think Flexbase is the best existing code so far and before we invest more time in AMS, dynamic types or other methods to achieve the goal of dynamically extending user entry forms with flexible positioning, we might take a look at Flexbase first and try to improve it, hopefully coming to *one* standard how to quickly and *easily* extend (existing) code with the ability to add attributes using a web interface that can be used by a non developer.
