[dev] Re: Re: Adding contact to nag task [Patch]

[Jeroen Huinink]

"Hans Lellelid" <hans at appliedsec.com> wrote:

> >Good idea. Although I'ld rather call it "relationship_type". Which
> >application
> >defines the possible values for the relationship types? Would that be the
> >source application only or could this also be the target application?
> >The links that are defined here are directional. There is a "from" and
there
> >is a "to". Of course these links can be reversed. E.g. working from
Gollem
> >I have a set of documents and each has an author associated with them. If
I
> >go into Turba I would like to have the ability to find all documents that
> >have
> >a certain author.
>

> Yes -- good point & good question.  In the example of documents &
> document authors, I think that the relationship would exist in Gollem
> (is that the "from" app?).
Yes.
>                            Of course I agree that it would be nice for
> Turba to know about which apps were using Turba's entities in
> relationships...  Perhaps this simply has to be done by convention.
> Perhaps Gollem & Turba agree that the relationshp_type for authors is
> going to be "document_author". In Gollem this relationship_type is
> responsible for looking up the person(s) who is an author of a given
> document; in Turba this relationship_type is used to find documents that
> a person has authored.

> Does that make sense?  I'm not sure that would account for all needs,
> but it seems like there's going to have to be some agreement/convention
> between applications for them to be able to share data.

This requires initimate knowledge of each other capabilities and/or the
actual source code. It is good programming practice to avoid this as much
as possible. Hence the idea of a registry and API's. If we can create a
scheme that allows communication about these capabilities without knowing
the inner workings you could use different versions of applications or
different applications that could cooperate as long as they both obey to
the rules set by the registry/API's.

I am not sure how to achieve this, but it would be nice if we could.

Regards,
Jeroen