Thanks for that Nick
I think all of these are kludes really, I am looking at Hibernate so
which works with Java (the system we are developing is in Java but
the same problem I am sure that has faced a llot of CF developers)
The other way is to have multiple tables that can hold these simple
values, but it starts getting messy with the joins etc
so you could have one table with the main details, then tables with
key/value pairs with the value being of a different type (int,
varchar, double etc)
But I think you are right and that performance degrades therearfter
MD
On 02/02/06, Nick de Voil <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > I have been searching for a method (and here is where I am stumped at
> > the terminology to search for!) to dynamically add properties to some
> > record.
> <snip>
> > Any pointers? This must be a problem that has been addressed a number
> > of times
>
> Yes, certainly have addressed it a number of times.
>
> With a relational database the only options afaik are:
>
> 1. change the underlying structure
> 2. have a (huge) table containing the attribute values of each entity
> separately, with a lookup table of attributes
> 3. have a finite number of extra user-definable columns in each table
> ("custom field 1", "custom field 2" etc)
>
> We use 2 in our CMS. I refer to this as "soft metadata" but I don't know
> what anyone else calls it. It's the only solution that's generic enough for
> our purposes, because we provide an object-oriented data model with a kind
> of multiple inheritance. The performance implications need an awful lot of
> attention though. If solution 1 is an option, I'd consider it very
> carefully.
>
> Some software packages use option 3 rather successfully but it's basically a
> kludge, isn't it.
>
> Nick
>
>
>
>
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