[ZODB-Dev] Objects containing references to other objects

[Steve Spicklemire]

Hmmm... in one place you say ZDB, in another you say Zope. If you are 
really using Zope, and not ZDB alone, you can use ZPatterns. I've found 
that it can allow you to keep a lot of your RDBM concepts while making 
full use of ZODB and the associated Zopisms. You might want to check it 
out:

http://www.zope.org/Members/pje/ZPatterns

-steve

On Tuesday, June 5, 2001, at 07:19 AM, Jeff Kowalczyk wrote:

> If you have an object (say "person") who might have other objects of
> various classes (other person, appointment, purchaseorder, todo, etc.)
> that should be linked to them in some way, what does a ZDB user
> typically do?
>
> Modeling the objects as children/collections won't work for me. Most of
> these other objects would be first-class objects that have application
> features elsewhere in the system, and other locations.
>
> For example, a purchase order system might be a standalone applet, but
> you still want the 'company' field to point to an object in your
> separate contact database of company-class objects. Likewise, you'd want
> persons to point to their company object, if they have one.
>
> Aside from app structure, the secondary point of this line of
> questioning is to determine what and ODB/ZDB user does to prevent
> objects from having (possibly misspelled) text strings for names of
> objects that live elsewhere in the system. A string for your person or
> company name in the Purchase order is not as useful as the true
> ObjectID.
>
> I guess its still a holdover from my RDBMS mindset, but I'm not ready to
> give up normalization with ID's when I take the plunge into an ODBMS
> like zope. Do I have to, or does storing objectID's work? Does this
> explode into a complexity of object lifetimes that takes all the fun and
> practicality out of using Zope?
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> For more information about ZODB, see the ZODB Wiki:
> http://www.zope.org/Wikis/ZODB/
>
> ZODB-Dev mailing list  -  ZODB-Dev@zope.org
> http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zodb-dev