Indeed.
At least with strings it's possible to develop meaningful conventions.
With ints, there is literally no meaning other than "first come, first
served, set up a registry."
--Jeff
On May 19, 2009, at 1:57 PM, Earnie Boyd wrote:
Quoting Jeff Eaton <[email protected]>:
The problem is not one of information storage length, but of flag
collision.
Ints are fine as primary keys on a lookup table, or constant values
for internal flags that will never be extensible. For things we
know people will build on -- like node types, or node build modes
-- strings are the only way to avoid collisions when module
developers start expanding.
The only way to avoid a collision between developers of modules is
to create a namespace based on the module name for whatever the data
is. So for node_type a unique key of module and name creates the
necessary uniqueness required. The system though needs to include
the module for the content type in it's presentation so that one
knows by looking at the UI which module the content type is for.
Perhaps the use of fieldsets where the fieldset is the module name
could help clear up the confusion when more than one module could
create a UI data conflict.
