I'm -1 depending on what the intended use case is. Generic text fields should only be useful to human operators. In the case where you intend anything to programmatically access that information and it's generally useful, you're better off with specific columns per point of data. This is how we ended up with unparsable, yet critical, data in the comment fields of physical location table when we should have added real columns. The example in the issue is delivery services. The description field that I think is being referenced is one of LongDesc, LongDesc_1, or LongDesc_2 in the database. Columns should have one purpose and one meaning that is clear to a new developer working in the code and conceptually plausible to anyone else trying to understand how the system works. One compromise, I'm not a huge fan of, would be to allow for arbitrary structured data via a column of type jsonb instead of text. That's not a great answer from a usability or db theory perspective, but it's slightly better than regex parsing.
Jonathan G On 11/19/18, 3:09 PM, "Dave Neuman" <[email protected]> wrote: +1, I am fine with it. That table already has a lot of columns, what's one more!? On Mon, Nov 19, 2018 at 2:59 PM Jeremy Mitchell <[email protected]> wrote: > Sounds like server "notes" or a server "description". Seems like a fair > ask. I don't see the harm in adding an optional column to the server table > with type=text for this data. > > On Mon, Nov 19, 2018 at 2:16 PM Anuj Tyagi <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Hello Traffic Controllers, > > > > I discussed this with a couple of ATC users. We have multiple > > Description/text fields in Delivery Service configuration of TP. > Similarly, > > We should also have one text field in servers configuration. My use case > is > > to keep the service/serial id of the servers and any specific info for a > > server for which no field is available. > > > > I have created an issue on GitHub for it earlier: > > https://github.com/apache/trafficcontrol/issues/2764 > > <https://github.com/apache/trafficcontrol/issues/2764> > > > > It's not a major change so shouldn't be a problem. If everyone agrees, > I'd > > be interested to add that. > > > > Thank you > > Anuj Tyagi > > >
