<< is it not worth investigating to add
an extra field 'updated' or 'modified'? Or would that involve a
complete rewrite of MMBase? >>
I think it is not too hardto make this additional field available in newer systems. In fact, I believe the storage classes allready make this possible - if you edit the 'object.xml' in the builder config dir, you could add a field, which I believe will then be added in each (new) mmbase system.
There are, imo, two issues:
- converting older databases could be pretty tough
- adding another field at the lowest level adds complexity to clouds stored on relational databases (not a huge minus, but worth mentioning)
- doesn't work (IIRC) with support classes
You would also want a reliable system to update the field (i.e. using the database, or the lowest-level 'commit' method in MMObjectBuilder ).
A posisbility would be to add a methods that retrieve/compare the last-modified date in the core. This method can then take into account older systems that do NOT have a last-modified field (essentially leaving these systems without a method to check for changes in nodes).
Pierre
