Forum OpenACS Improvement Proposals (TIPs): Re: TIP #133: Change "bio" from being generic storage in "person" to type-specific storage in "user".

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13: Re: TIP #133: Change "bio" from being generic storage in "person" to type-specific storage in "user". (response to 12)
Posted by Don Baccus on 06/02/09 12:48 AM
the whole party/person/user abstraction, while a good one, is poorly implemented and messy.

If I leave it in person, less code needs changing, in fact the Tcl API needn't change a bit.

I'll leave it there for now and if some day people want to have a global argument about the person vs. user abstraction I'll sit and watch :)

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14: Re: TIP #133: Change "bio" from being generic storage in "person" to type-specific storage in "user". (response to 13)
Posted by Michael Steigman on 06/02/09 05:02 PM
I was kinda hoping to engender that global argument, Don :) I guess I didn't do a good enough job of stirring things up.

Don and I chatted about this offline and yes, there are multiple instances of developers adding columns in the wrong place (it appears 'users' has become the dumping ground for *anything* related to parties, even for data that relates to columns stored at other levels in the type hierarchy like, say, email). Don clarified one misconception I had about the person type per Lars' (author) intent, which was apparently for it to be a place to hold minimal amount of data on parties that are not yet full-blown users. With portrait and bio hanging off that type, it seemed to me that it was more like the place to hang non-account related attributes. I kind of liked that way of looking at it but, well, as Don pointed out, the whole situation is a little messy and has been muddied by developers over the years.

Anybody have strong (uh... or any) feelings on the matter?

Oh yeah, approved :)