Forum OpenACS Development: Re: Augmenting acs_objects - adding package_id, name, and clarifying other fields

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27: Re: Augmenting acs_objects - adding package_id, name, and clarifying other fields (response to 1)
Posted by Barry Books on 11/05/03 10:19 PM
I'd suggest adding a clob the acs_objects that contains an XML doc with the objects extra stuff. I don't think it would have much performance impact and then you can do anything. Oracle has support for indexing and querying it and Postgres does not seem to far behind.

It would be possible to specify tags for things line object_name. It would also be possible to have as many translated names as you like by having a set of name tags.

If template::list::create supported xpaths for elements you could easily build table data from the xml doc.

Services could interface with objects thru this document. For example if you want your object searchable via site wide search you could have a site_wide_search tag and put in data like keywords and view url.

ACS attributes could support xml storage and items in tags could also be attributes.

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29: Re: Using XML clobs in OpenACS (response to 27)
Posted by Dirk Gomez on 11/14/03 10:38 AM
Have you actually worked with XML datatypes Barry? I haven't yet seen much code for it save an article for Oracle Magazine. My gut feel is that they may be interesting for content that is truly hierarchical, but not for "networked" content like acs_objects. Eventually I want to be able to associate every object with every other object in the system (paying attention  to permissions of course).

Oh, and my other gutfeel is that they don't perform well on retrieval and are more used to trasport data in between systems.

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33: Re: Using XML clobs in OpenACS (response to 29)
Posted by Tom Jackson on 11/14/03 06:47 PM
Eventually I want to be able to associate every object with every other object in the system...

Dirk, your solution of adding an attribute to acs_objects will not allow you to do this, at most you will be able to associate an object with one other object, and the association will be of an unknown type (or a single type). Or maybe you can explain how it will work.

Also, repeating data in a parent table (acs_objects) is denormalizing in the wrong direction isn't it?

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34: Re: Using XML clobs in OpenACS (response to 33)
Posted by Dirk Gomez on 11/14/03 06:53 PM
That:s a bit taken out of context. The association business has to do with relational model vs. hierarchical model. If we were to use XML strictly it is practically impossible to associate entities in a way you can do in a  relational model.

Why is repeating data in a parent table the wrong direction for denormalization?