Re: Modeling Address using Relational Theory

On 1 Sep 2005 13:39:34 -0700, "dawn" <dawnwolthuis_at_gmail.com> wrote:

>Gene Wirchenko wrote:
>> On 1 Sep 2005 06:51:47 -0700, "dawn" <dawnwolthuis_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> [snip]
>>
>> >It really is easy to put address lines in a list, even if only the
>> >lines that end up as 2nd & 3rd on an address label. So, the components
>> >that might be rendered as an address label are often (in non-SQL
>> >implementations):
>> >
>> >MailToName (perhaps derived from title, first, middle, last, suffix,
>> >for example)
>> >AddressLines (multi-valued)
>>
>> Why? You could simply have an addresslines value that can extend
>> over more than one line.
>
>If you know that you always want to represent the address with multiple
>lines, then you could consider it a document and format it with markup.
> Because I might want to have a one-line-per-person listing at some
>point, I'd rather model it with the individual values and then
>represent the list in the way desired. I'm guessing that would be a
>more relational approach too -- letting the front-end handle
>representation rather than using markup? But if you think of markup as
>more abstract so you use a stylesheet, for example, then you could
>handle your lists as documents if you don't typically need to select
>the nth value. From what you have written here before, I don't suspect
>you are really advocating such an approach, however, are you? --dawn

     A multiline data value neatly sidesteps the database problem. It would make DE a bit awkward though.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko Received on Fri Sep 02 2005 - 02:29:25 CEST