Re: Adding support for meta-information to entity and field definitions

[Jacopo Cappellato]

On Jul 27, 2008, at 9:57 PM, David E Jones wrote:

If I understand this right some other words to consider might be "tag" or "label" or the like instead of metadata. Technically an entity definition is itself "meta data" because it describes the data. In a way this would be a sort of "meta meta data" because it is describes the stuff that describes the data. For this specific need maybe something less generic might actually work better. Are there really other types of tags that we would want to associate with the entities, or should we just stick with something BI-specific. Also, for the BI need would we need just one tag, or multiple tags for a given entity? It might also be nice to have the possible values, or at least some of them, built into the XSD to keep them consistent and self-documenting. I guess what I'm thinking after all this is that a simple attribute like "olap-type" or something with the options in the XSD might be both easier to use (self-document, less error-prone) and better fit the problem.

What do you think?

Jacopo

Thanks David, this would be enough for what I need to do; I just need a similar attribute for the "entity" and "view-entity" elements: should I use the same name ("olap-type") of the attribute of the "field" element? But maybe olap-type is a good name also for the entity attribute (with values: "fact", "star-schema", "dimension").

-David



On Jul 27, 2008, at 10:21 AM, Jacopo Cappellato wrote:

I would like to add support for meta data information to entity and field definitions: for example, define an entity as a dimensional entity (for business intelligence analysis) or a fact entity, or a star schema; or define a field as "additive" (for drill down reports) etc... Of course this information will not affect in any ways the table in the database, it will just be available as an entity additional information. For example, in the bi component we have a screen that shows you all the entities that are star schemas: right now this is done with an hack using the entity package name (following a naming convention)... I would like to use metadata information for this.

The entity definition could be similar to:


      <metadata>fact entity</metadata>
      <metadata>accounting</metadata>

      <field name="quantity" type="floating-point">

          <metadata>additive</metadata>
          <metadata>...</metadata>
      </field>
      ...
  </entity>



What do you think?
Should I go on and implement this?

Jacopo

<entity entity-name="SalesInvoiceItemFact" package- name="org.ofbiz.bi.fact.accounting" title="Sales Invoice Item Fact"> <description>A transaction fact entity for invoices.</ description> <description>Quantity invoiced. From InvoiceItem.quantity</description> I am not sure if "metadata" is the correct word... probably not (any suggestion is much appreciated), maybe something like "keyword" could be good, I don't know.

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