On Apr 9, 2005, at 9:23 AM, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
Sure it's easy to add a property 'handle' to a node and model it that way, but it would be way more elegant (and more future proof, since I'm already thinking about exporting that content as RDF, were the URIs are king) if it was possible for JCR to allow *you* to pick the UUID for the node.
Why don't you just set a property for an external reference name?
So, my question is: is it possible to specify the node UUID externally? (as long as local unicity is guaranteed, obviously)
Not really, since fast implementations will depend on it being a fixed-length number (internally) rather than a string.
Oh, c'mon, that's totally bogus: do a hash on the ID if you need a fix number.
In any case, I would think that you would eventually want multiple persistent identifiers for a resource, particularly since some identifiers must change when the bits change whereas others only change when the semantics change.
Ok, here you're talking. Makes perfect sense.
BTW, UUIDs are not globally unique over time -- only for a decade or so based on common implementations, and even less than that if the implementation is stupid. They are completely unsuitable as persistent names.
Are they at least locally unique over time? I mean, if I had a URI like
http://your.domain/uuid/[UUID]
would that be unique? I'm asking because I'm thinking of ways to encode the 'system' view of the JCR tree into RDF and I need to make sure that I have a way to refer to each and every node in a sound way.
-- Stefano.
