On Sun, Apr 14, 2013 at 7:19 PM, <reagle...@magian.com> wrote: > I'm working on a project at the moment that has a rather unusual requirement > and I'm hoping to get some advice on the best way to handle it or even some > pointers to info that can help me build a solution. > > Ok, so this is what I need to do. The application stores and manages various > types of media files but each deployment of the application has completely > different metadata requirements for the media files. > > This metadata can contain an arbitrary number of fields of different types > (single line text, multi-line text, checkboxes, selected values, etc.) and > also often requires validation particularly presence and uniqueness > validations. > > The application needs to be able to easily retrieve values and most > importantly has to be able to handle full searching capabilities on these > fields. > > One option I considered was using a property list arrangement where the > database table simply contained a property name and value for each metadata > field of each media file. However, when prototyping this solution it quickly > became apparent that it simply wasn't going to be efficient enough for the > searching and retrieval of records particularly when the database can be > reasonably large e.g. a recent deployment had 3000 media files and there > were over 20 metadata fields. Also, the queries to do a search and retrieve > the relevant records quickly became very complex. > > Another option that the system is currently using is that the metadata > config is defined upfront and a migration is run during deployment to create > a the table and model with a standard name so that the media model can be > associated with it which the system then uses. This generally works pretty > fine but it does cause some significant deployment and testing issues. > > For example, writing unit tests becomes much more challenging when you don't > know the config until deployment. Although I could write a sample config and > test the code that way, it won't allow me to test the specific requirements > of a particular deployment. > > Similarly, in development, it currently requires me to copy a migration from > the config into the main folder, run it, do all of my testing and > development and then I have to remember to rollback and remove that > migration from the main folder so that the application is in a standard > state. This particularly becomes challenging when I'm bug fixing and I need > to have the application in a specific configuration for testing and > debugging purposes. Trying to switch between the various configurations > becomes a real nightmare. > > Ideally, what I would like is to be able to dynamically create the table and > model including validations, etc. from a config file when the server is > started. Even better would be if I could maintain multiple metadata setups > in the one database with each one having its own table so that all I need to > do to switch between them is change which config file the application is > currently using. > > I'm sure this can be done with Rails but there is very little information > that I've been able to find that can point me in the right direction of how > to build it during my research over the past few days so any help or > suggestions would be much appreciated!
So, this is after about 5 minutes thought, so bear that in mind. :) Working on the premise that metadata is basically a key-value sort of thing, maybe you could split it out of the application proper, and use a Rails engine serving it up via a MongoDB implementation. The Rails app proper could do all the normal sorts of things you have, and the engine can be used to handle just the metadata parts. The app can remain metadata agnostic that way, and provide the needed elements based upon the information it retrieves from the engine. Going a step further, you could combine more front end intelligence into the app, say via backbone.js and underscore.js, and use them to interact with the metadata serving part of your app. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rubyonrails-talk+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
