Forum OpenACS Development: Replicate news among instances of news pkg

Hi there,

I have the following scenario and I'd like to share it with the community just in case we have a better way to accomplish the goal.

I have several instances of package "news" that are mounted under several subsites bellow the Mainsite.
Under the Mainsite I also have another instance of package "news" where I created a functionality, parameterized, to replicate "news items" to the other instances distributed in the subsites bellow the Mainsite.

There are a few considerations:

1) The "news item" must be actually duplicated, which means I must not link, somehow, the "news item" from the main instance, to any instance bellow, in order to read it from there. The reasons for that are many. They lay down in the OACS dependencies and associations such as permissions and etc.

2) Moreover I do need to recreate/import the "news item" from the main instance to the respective instance choosen.

The big question is: How do I know/associate that the duplicated "news item" comes from the main "news item" from the main instance?

I believe the best way to go is using acs_rels. I can create a new rel_type called replicate_news, on acs_rel_types, and use it acs_rels to know/associate both items such as in

(rel_type,object_id_one,object_id_two) = (replicated_news,news_id1, news_id2)

Any ideas if this is the best way to go?

Ryan,

You misunderstood the main idea. What you described doesn't fit in the scenario.

The structure is already in place, package instances are already there.
I want to avoid the duplicated work of the staff. i.e. the situation to manually create a "news item" twice, on two different package instances.

1) Because every subsite as well as dotlrn communities, must have an individual application of news.

2) I agree that duplicated objects looks at least unnecessary and redundant information. But I still don't see another way to accomplish it. Your approach about giving permission seems very confuse, plus it would add even more customised code in the news package .

3) What do you mean with a use case of how the news are viewed?
The news are viewed by subsite or dotlrn community. Each one community or subsite has one instance of news package, if its closed the news are available only to members, if not the public is allowed to view so.

I don't why it was made like that but maybe there is a reason for it. I believe it was to make things more organised and easier to maintain. I also think the same.

By the way, We are discussing what is the best to be done, aren't we?

Once we figure out the approach to take I am well aware of how to code it

Nope, just a few.
Precisely, the ones they choose to.