At 05:00 PM 2/6/2003 +0100, Mattias Konradsson wrote:
[Relational Method.]That's interesting. I went the other way. I first developed my MV query engine to support content metadata and realized the same issues applied to user preferences... I guess there are only so many ways to skin a cat.
This method would allow you to create a "dynamic database" inside of sql server. Luckily I already developed this part for handling user prefences when I realized that i couldnt fix them to a certain set of attributes but would have to make a easy way for administrators to customize preferences. I developed a system with "Entities" stored in the database, each entity has a certain entity type, each entitytype has a certain number of atttributetypes associated with it, these attributetypes can be integers strings etc and also sets of values like Skills[C#,C++,Java] or a single value from a valuelist like Country[Sweden]
This could be used for metadata, simply defining a entitytype for each documenttype containing relevant attributes such as for example author, datecreated etc etc.
I found it was well worth it to write a query engine for application use. Think baby SQL:
From simple: DocId="/foo/bar/baz.html"
To more complex: CollId = "/foo/bar" and Subject = "Baby Giraffes"
and Date >= 2002-09-01
Such a mini-query language has all the advantages of SQL for client applications and the CMS itself. Such an engine is actually more difficult to implement in SQL than a record-oriented database.
take it easy,
Charlie
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