Re: tricky database design

> One of my rules of thumb is that as soon as you start putting
> the names of tables into other tables, something is wrong with
> the model. Table names are metadata, and data inside tables
> are data - they are very different things.

I totally agree. I could sense that I wasn't quite going about it the right way, but could think of any other way to do it. I just thought that perhaps doing it the wrong way (ie. the only way I could think of) would help someone understand what I was trying to do.  

> I think it might be wise to step back and think about what
> your data represents. You have pages, and best I can tell,
> the structure of a page is that it contains items of two kinds
> in a particular order. The fact that you have named them
> headings and copy suggests to me that headings "head"
> something (perhaps some "copy"?). If that is the case,
> perhaps you have pages - pages that have sections, and
> sections that comprise one heading and one (?) copy - a
> shallow hierarchy, perhaps.
[...]
> Do you think you can provide a better idea of just
> how things relate to one another?

Sure. Thanks for offering your expertise. You can't know how much I value this kind of valuable specialized free advice. Hail usenet!

I actually do not want such a hierachy. I want there to be elements that are all children of the parent page itself. Later maybe subgroupings could be introduced, but at this point I want only one level of depth. I want to be able to have elements of different types that could be ordered together in any way the user desires....

You are correct that I am thinking of "heading" as basically a heading for copy. An <h1> basically. "copy" would be basically a paragraph or <p>.
I might also like to have other types of elements...perhaps images.

So, the user could have this configuration on a page:

Heading
Paragraph
Image
Paragraph
Heading

Or, they could switch it around and also have:

Heading
Heading
Paragraph
Image
Heading
Image

I'd like to save these elements in thier respective tables, along with the order in which they appear on the page. Then, if the user wanted to move the elements around on the page, they could do so in any order they want. It's very easy for me to concieve of how to actually execute this (I'm more of a programmer than a database engineer) than it is to understand how to store it and retrieve the arrays I need from the database.

I know there's something I'm missing...some way to represent the relationship between the page, and these elements that are located in several different tables, but I just can't quite wrap my brain around it.

Is that a little bit clearer? If not...I could actually generate some examples of the kind of HTML pages I'd like to generate, and the kinds of forms that I'd like people to be able to use to manipulate it.

Thanks again,
DanielTalsky.com Received on Wed Jan 08 2003 - 20:12:34 CET