Hi all,
A while ago there was a short discussion about symlinks to topics
and articles.
I've taken a look at it, and single-level links are pretty easy.
I've looked at two approaches and would like to hear your thoughts
on the matter.
The first approach introduces a new table to hold the symlinks.
This is lightweight storage-wise, but would require an extra
JOIN for the _fast routines to work with them (thus eliminating
their 'fast'ness).
The other approach would add an extra row to the topic and article
table so an article or topic can say it's only a placeholder for
a symlink. This makes links somewhat heavyweight (after all,
all fields for the link are meaningless but the link field itself)
but they can be returned as usual by the _fast routines. After
a _fast fetch you would still be responsible to check if a topic/
article is really a symlink and fetch it at that time (and
check that it indeed exists).
Summarized:
symlink table:
pro: lightweight
con: links would not be returned with _fast calls
placeholders:
pro: links would be returned for _fast calls
con: sorting for links would not be reliable for _fast calls (since they'll
be sorted on the placeholder fields), heavyweight storage-wise. And
it's definately not the clean approach. Muddles AC.
The sorting problem for the placeholder approach could be 'fixed' by updating
all placeholders as their target is updated (thereby making them clones
of their target for all but their children). This would require changes
in the article fetching and updating functions, and has AC implications.
Bye,
Emile
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