Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: universal way of displaying lists of objects needed

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Posted by Jun Yamog on
While waiting for this darn site indexer to index a ton of content.  Maybe I can contribute something.

Some people do tend to think that CR is wide and heavy.  While acs_objects lacks some stuff and needs to beef up.  Maybe what we need to have a new convention of none revisioned content.  Content that does not inherit from cr_revisions.  Pretty much like what is cr_folders is right now.  CR folders are from cr_items and not from cr_revisions.  Although its none standard maybe it possible to just use something similar.

There had been many cases when I worked in CR that some content type did not merit revisions.  I did still however made use of revisions and just hide the aspect of revision from the UI.  The above (acs_objects_description) can be derived from cr_items.  Since we are just interested on objects that are displayed on the user and not internal objects, its logical that we use CR.  Although current CR usage does suggest to have revision, but its not hard not to use revisions.  Its like having cr_no_revisions table, although that would not differ from cr_revisions :)

Anyway just some thoughts, from someone trying to catch up with OpenACS.

I'm also thinking that if using revisions simply doesn't make too much sense in a package then it simply should not use it and instead overwrite the one (and only) revision for each item each time the content gets edited (don't know if that already happens, if not, then we might think about that).

I also have to add that it seems that we will not only need the name of objects that use the CR, but also for objects for which it doesn't make sense to store them in the CR.

I want to give an example: Currently, i'm working on a categorization and a mailing list package. Mailing lists can be assigned to some categories. Hopefully, the category package will get used in other packages, too, let's say bboard and file-storage. In the categories package i want to have a directory in which the user can specify a category and he'll get a list of all objects categorized in that way, so he'll see a list of all bboard-postings, files and mailing-lists assigned a selected category. But mailing-list objects will definetely not be kept in the CR since that really doesn't make any sense, wastes disc space and blows up the already huge CR tables.

That's just one example for objects which will not be in the CR, but still might to get displayed in an object list.

So that's why i'm proposing adding a seperate table for that information as i suggested above and not using only the infos in the CR.