[thesite] CodeFest: Flights and LOTTD

Joshua Olson joshua at alphashop.com
Fri Sep 21 15:51:14 CDT 2001


Jeff,

:  ><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><
:  > But, it does raise some issues to decide upon before
:  > we jump in there.  Again, do we want to discuss
:  > particulars now?  Some of the nuances of this affect
:  > 5 and 6 (Linking related articles and tracking views)
:  ><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><
:
: as well as a fairly significant database change as well.
:
: i'd vote to table it for now for further discussion about impact on the
: user and technical implementation.

I just looked over the db architecture a little and it seems that there is
already an association table created for managing the many-to-many
relationship:

http://members.evolt.org/rudy/oracle4.gif

The relationship does not contain any additional information, however, which
may be what is required to gain full value for the investment.  Things that
you can do with the relationship table is include the views (how many times
the article was viewed when it was within a specific category), but
introduces the complexity of deciding which category to jump a user to when
they click on the article off the homepage!  The logical solution would be
to include a default category id, which could be handled by the current
category_id in the content table.

You are right that there are a lot of things to discuss and it is best not
to jump in without thinking about them.  However, I do not believe that
tabling the idea is the best answer.  Instead, we should bounce the ideas
around, examining impact to users and costs involved in implementation, and
then decide to move on it or hold during the first week of October.  That
gives us almost 2 weeks to think about this.

-joshua





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