Forum OpenACS Q&A: RFC: Using XoWiki as a course catalog

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1: RFC: Using XoWiki as a course catalog
Posted by Nima Mazloumi on 08/20/07 05:19 PM
Hi,

we plan to use xowiki as part of an major integration project. .LRN will be intergrated with the central course management system. For this purpose we would like to use xowiki as the course catalog together with categories. Xowiki will be used for presentation purposes. The question is how to deal with relations. Shall we use categories or objects:

Organisational Unit --> Professor
Professor --> Course
Course --> Room

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2: Re: RFC: Using XoWiki as a course catalog (response to 1)
Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 08/21/07 10:14 AM
I don't understand the question about objects or categories, could you please be more specific what attributes the objects would have an what kind of categories you want ?

Furthermore, I assume you will use xowiki::Forms?

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3: Re: RFC: Using XoWiki as a course catalog (response to 1)
Posted by Nima Mazloumi on 08/21/07 10:26 AM
Malte, the attributes are not important. Those I can easily display with pagetemplate. form is not important as well since the course data is coming from an external system. Thus in xowiki I only display the data.

Important are the relationships:

An organisational unit has several professors.
A professor offers several courses.
A course can occupy several rooms.

Using xowiki if I display the course I want to autogenerate links to the corresponding organisational unit, professors and rooms.

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4: Re: RFC: Using XoWiki as a course catalog (response to 1)
Posted by Nima Mazloumi on 08/21/07 10:28 AM
Since professors, rooms and organisational units usually dont change that often I could use categories for that but categories have no support for attributes. therefore objects would be more preferable (like a pageinstance).
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5: Re: RFC: Using XoWiki as a course catalog (response to 3)
Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 08/22/07 10:14 AM
If you are sure you will not need the information about professors and courses somewhere in .LRN itself, then just go with FormPages and create one Form for each "object type".

So you would create courses, professors and organizational units as xowiki::Forms and for each course have an xowiki::FormPage. These pages you could then link up using xowiki relationships.

I don't think categories makes any sense here.

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6: Re: RFC: Using XoWiki as a course catalog (response to 1)
Posted by Nima Mazloumi on 08/22/07 10:22 AM
What are xowiki relationships?