Re: How to model searchable properties of an entity

From: Wolfgang Loch <spam_at_wolosoft.com>
Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2004 12:07:26 +0200
Message-ID: <cfv9ou$2ut$1@news.epages.de>

> And if the issue IS coming from an OO perspective, than how
> is having hundreds of classes and subclasses good while
> hundreds of tables is bad?

I think the real question is runtime versus design time. From what I understand the attributes have to be added dynamically at runtime by users without assistance from a programmer or DBA.

The challenge from OO perspective is similar to data-centric view. Neither can't create hundreds of classes at runtime nor you can create hundreds of tables at runtime. What is need is a dynamic structure that allows for adding attributes to existsing entities or classes.

In an OO program I would use a Map or Hash data structure. A corresponding structure is required to persist this Hash into the database. The database should allow queries by name-value pairs which returns all objects having a certain value of a user-defined attribute.

Wolfgang Received on Wed Aug 18 2004 - 05:07:26 CDT