[ansel] Request for API pointers

[Heath S. Hendrickson]

Chuck Hagenbuch wrote:

>>
>> a:2:{s:4:"time";i:1079941418;s:4:"host";s:16:"ultraspace.local";}
>
>
> That's just serialized data, and you really really REALLY do not want 
> to use it.
> It's completely opaque, hard to manage, inefficient, unsearchable, etc.
>
> All you need to do is to add the relevant data into the attributes of the
> DataTreeObject_Image object, and the datatree storage will handle them 
> for you
> automatically.
>
> -chuck

That's fine by me... I just was looking for a way to store an arbitrary 
amount of data for each image in as efficient a storage manner as 
possible.  Does anyone have any objections to just storing it as a 
single attribute (image_exif_data) as a delimited string?

I was thinking something along the lines of:   
name=value__name=value__name=value

the "__" (two underscores) is very unlikely to ever bee seen in either 
the names or values of the exif data.

If I went the route of using fixed attributre names, I'd have to 
hard-code all the possible EXIF fields into the code, making a little 
more work to maintain.  If there is no database storage benefit to using 
delimited values (and there are drawbacks), just say so and I'll go down 
the multi-attribute route.

h