On Monday, April 15, 2013 2:24:43 AM UTC+1, reag...@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.
I'd use something like elasticsearch to handle the searching side of this, rather than having some monstrous join to join your metadata key/value table. With this you store your data as you like it - as long as you can produce a json document representing the record with all these metadata fields that should be searchable it won't care how your relational database stored them. You might also want to try a document oriented database like mongo rather than forcing a relational model on this (you can actually use elasticsearch like this too) Fred > 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! -- 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. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rubyonrails-talk/-/ltOozT4IbOgJ. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
