[dev] Wild thoughts on relationships, Was: Adding contact to nag task

[Hans Lellelid]

>So in a perfect dream world, one would be able to configure
>- the cardinality (1 person has at most 1 birthday and vice versa)
>- wether a side should show UI for
>  - generation of new partners
>  - displaying existing partners (and allowing to follow the link)
>  - deletion of existing partners
>
>  
>
I think everyone is arguing for a pretty loose model that would hook 
into the registry & would accommodate the directionality (& possible 
bi-directionality) you mention.  This model would not, however, in 
itself handle UI stuff...  Seems like there are a few options: (1) don't 
worry about UI at all, but simply provide a link to a page (e.g. to 'new 
event' page in this example) where content of related type can be 
entered,  (2) leave UI to the app that needs UI & simply have the 
"sponsoring" application return imporatant info needed to build UI (e.g. 
available locations, categories, etc. for an event) and (3) have the 
sponsoring application actually build the UI, using Horde_Form or some 
sort of system that uses widgets that can inherit any customizations 
implemented for the relationship-requesting application.

I think in the long run that option 3 would make most sense, but in the 
short-term I would be very happy with option 1.

>2. relationships, that connect more than two modules:
>Ok, perhaps this goes to far - even for a perfect dream world ;-)
>
>  
>
What do you mean by this?  Do you mean that some piece of content may 
need to be related to more than one different type of content?  -- e.g. 
that a "document_source" relationship could relate a document to either 
be an organization, a person, a URL or an email message (bad example, I 
know)?

Or do you simply mean that you'd like the API to be able to fetch 
indirectly related items ... something like:
   
    $Rel->getRelated('document_author')->getRelated('author_homepage') 
// obviously not PHP :-)

Cheers,
Hans
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