Jukka Zitting wrote:
> There are a number of difficulties associated in the symlinks if they're
> implemented as a special kind of an article record. Issues like data
> integrity, ownership and access control get quite hairy.
Absolutely. And hairy means more opportunity for errors.
> Implementing
> them safely and efficiently would require limiting the usability of the
> symlinks quite a lot. I'd implement such symlinks only at the PHP level.
>
> Implementing symlinks as a separate table would be cleaner. They would
> be efficient and easy to control. The symlink records could have their
> own score fields if needed, but the fields of the actual articles could
> also be used in ordering. Symlink ownership would be separate from the
> article ownership and broken links would be easy to locate and remove.
> The only but would be that you'd need to use a separate
> mgd_list_linked_articles function instead of the normal
> mgd_list_articles.
But doing this would set the linked articles and topics apart from the
normal ones. I assume that most would expect the linked objects to be
returned with the same list fetch, and have the ordering of the linked
objects preserved. Having the links returned with the objects using the
targets' properties for the ordering is simple, but I wouldn't know how
to ORDER BY symlink_score-if-set-otherwise-article-score.
Then again, fetching the links separate from the articles and topics can
be
done way cleaner.
Bye,
Emile
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