Intro:
In case you haven't seen any of my previous messages to the list, I'm still
a WO/EO newbie so bear in mind that I might ask stupid questions or require
clarification on the answers. I'm getting there, but ... I still hit walls
where I don't know how to proceed. Fortunately, this list has been
invaluable for getting me around those walls, and here's to hoping y'all can
help me again. Many thanks in advance. My DB and programming experience is
good, and if you point me in the right direction, I can probably find my
way. I do all my WO code in Java, but if you do it in ObjectiveC, I can
probably figure it out anyway.
Recap:
My last question had to do with how to make qualifications based on
particular records (whose PK is the only guaranteed unique field) across a
relation. While many people suggested setting the qualification to
attributes across the relation, someone pointed out that I could set a
qualification based on the related object itself. So while I can't say
"show all users whose company FK is <X>", (since the FK is not a class
property), I can say "show all users whose company is <X>" where <X> is the
company object I want to filter by. That worked perfectly, no problems at
all with that. Thanks for all the responses.
New Question:
I'm hitting a level of abstraction that I don't know how to handle with
EO/WO. Imagine, if you will, a table that contains intervals. (intervalID,
startDate, endDate), another that contains Rates (rateID, price, intervalID)
for those intervals. Let's say this system is for renting cars. In
January, a car rental costs $20 per day, and in February the car rental
costs $30 per day. Let's also assume that multiple car-types are for rent,
and while they all use the same intervals, they each have their own rate.
Now, a user comes along and wants to know the cost of renting a car for a
given date range.
If their date range falls into one of those intervals, it's mostly easy.
Qualify a rates display group to show all rates whose dates encompass the
range the user has requested, and they'll see the cars they could rent and
how much it will cost them. Except ... how do you display the total price?
Let's say you wanted to display the rates, one per line, with the total
price for the user's date range at the end of the line. Normally, I'd just
make a display group, use a repitition object, and off I go. But in this
case, I want to take two user-supplied values (start date, end date) do some
calculations based on that rate's information (price) and add that to the
line. But the user's date range isn't part of the Rate object, so I can't
just make that a query to the rate object. I must be missing something
here. Again, I know exactly how I would do that in ASP, but I'm not really
sure how to approach it in WO. I wish the tutorials had gone a lot farther.
Even if I figure out how to solve that, I have a new problem: what if the
user's date range spans two or more intervals? Then a display group is out
the window. How on earth am I going to nicely display a table that shows
them their car options, the total price for that choice, and possibly the
details of the pricing that span two intervals. I suppose the details could
wait 'til they've selected one of the choices, which makes it a little
simpler, but I'm still very much lost on how to do the rest of it in WO. I
know exactly how I'd do it in something like ASP, where it's all very
manual, but I haven't entirely figured out how one goes about these things
in WO, where very little is manual.
In fact, I'm not even sure I could do this the manual way in WO, but I
ideally won't have to.
Ugh.
Anyway. Pointers to docs and examples that came with WO4..0, general
descriptions of how to handle it, detailed commentary, technical tips, all
appreciated. I can only hope that sooner or later I'll have enough of a
mental grasp on WO's way of doing things so that I can return the favour.
- Geoffrey
Certified WO Newbie
--
Geoffrey Wiseman,
New Media Developer, Medium One Productions
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.mediumone.com/ (416)361-2030
"here is little effie's head whose brains are made of gingerbread"
