Paul, I think I get where you are coming from. With a defined structure, table and field names it is fairly easy to see what the model is. What you see is pretty much what you get.
Introduce objects and you suddenly have hidden data structures. Indeed those data structures can vary by record which makes them even more mysterious. Not dissimilar to the content of BLObs or for that matter large text fields. When I first started using object fields I largely confined them to holding program managed properties which I documented in the code. This still accounts for more than 80% of our object field use. Of course with the power and flexibility of object fields and ORDA it would be a crying shame to relegate objects to being an entirely developer toy. They can deliver such power and joy to the users. Managing properties naming and existence then becomes the challenge... Some ideas I have had is: External manual documentation - Takes a lot of commitment and keeping on top of especially with a development team. A new field slipped in is immediately visible and can be questioned and QC'd. A new property is invisible except in data and so bad naming choices may not be caught till testing generates that element. The only way to know all the properties and values in an object is to parse all records with the object field. This could be a costly process, I have not tried it on millions of records. The alternative is what? Have a common set of properties even if empty/null for every record? I feel that kind of defeats the object __ I am still feeling my way with this and recognise it as a potential to be a gotcha. I have found implementing a REST interface to get at data very useful for seeing what is in my records. Objects of course just naturally show their entire structure within the returned JSON. In some systems I have reference records that I can just filter for to give me the entire user data structure with data examples. Regards, Dougie ________________________________________________________ telekinetix Limited- J. Douglas Cryer Phone : 01234 761759 Mobile : 07973 675 218 2nd Floor Broadway House, 4-6 The Broadway, Bedford MK40 2TE Email : jdcr...@telekinetix.com Web : http://www.telekinetix.com <http://www.telekinetix.com/> ________________________________________________________ ********************************************************************** 4D Internet Users Group (4D iNUG) Archive: http://lists.4d.com/archives.html Options: https://lists.4d.com/mailman/options/4d_tech Unsub: mailto:4d_tech-unsubscr...@lists.4d.com **********************************************************************
