Hello I stumbled into the Code Effects. The idea behind is very interesting to me, especially the Rule Editor.
Would the engine work with the data that is already saved to a database through entity classes (referred as source objects in Code Effects)? Our system is a data collection system that has a lot of forms. Data in one form could be related to data in more than one other form. For example, we often need to ensure that if an answer to a question in Form 1 is Yes, then Question 3 and 5 on Form 5 must be answered. And there are other types of cross-references between different elements.
Thank you.
John
Yes, dependencies in the Code Effects engine can exist in multiple ways. That's one of the points of having a business rules engine.
Related
I have a situation as described in the ExtbaseFluid book:
I would like to store information in the intermediate table which is not recommended at all.
Here is a cite from the warning box of the above linked book chapter:
Do not store data in the Intermediate Table that concern the Domain. Though TYPO3 supports this (especially in combination with Inline Relational Record Editing (IRRE) but this is always a sign that further improvements can be made to your Domain Model. Intermediate Tables are and should always be tools for storing relationships and nothing else.
Let’s say you want to store a CD with its containing music tracks: CD -- m:n (Intermediate Table) -- Song. The track number may be stored in a field of the Intermediate Table. However, the track should be stored as a separate domain object, and the connection be realized as CD -- 1:n -- Track -- n:1 -- Song.
So I want not to do what is not recommended. But thinking about the workflow for the editor that results of the recommended solution rises a few question for me.
To stay with this example I would need the following tables:
tx_extname_domain_model_cd
tx_extname_domain_model_cd_track_mm
tx_extname_domain_model_track (which holds the track number)
tx_extname_domain_model_track_song_mm
tx_extname_domain_model_song
From what I know this would end in the situation that the editor would need to create following records:
one record for the cd
one record for the song
now the editor can create one record for the track.
There the track number is added.
Furthermore the cd record needs to be assigned as well as the song.
So here are my questions:
I guess this workflow cannot be improved with some (to me unknown) TCA setup?
An editor cannot directly reach the song when the cd record is opened?
Instead first she / he has to open the track record and can from there navigate to the song?
Is it really that bad to store data in the intermediate table? The TYPO3 table sys_file_reference does the same!? But I wonder how those data could be shown (because IRRE is not possible because it shall only be used for 1:n relations (source).
The question you have to ask yourself is: Do I want to do coding by the book, or do I want to create a pragmatic approach to solve a customer's problem?
In this specific case the additional problem is, that the people who originally invented Extbase had a quite sophisticated and academic approach, but when it comes to a pragmatic use and performance, they were blocked by their own rules and stuck with coding by the book.
Especially this example and the warning message shows a way of thinking that was one of the reasons, why I never actually used Extbase but went for Core-API methods to create performant and pragmatic queries to get the desired result sets. Now that we've got Doctrine under the hood, this works like a charm even with quite exotic DB flavors.
Of course intermediate tables are a good idea and of course those intermediate tables can and should be enriched with additional data fields, that do not require a 3rd, 4th or nth table to store i.e. a simple set of dropdown options, since this can easily be handled with attributes configured in TCA, as it is shown here: https://docs.typo3.org/m/typo3/reference-tca/master/en-us/ColumnsConfig/Type/Inline/Examples.html
sys_file_reference is the most prominent example since it provides exactly that kind of additional information that should not be pumped into additional tables - and guess what, the TYPO3 core does not make use of a single line of Extbase code to deal with that data or almost any other data of the core tables.
To answer your last question: Take a look at the good old IRRE Tutorial to get a clue how to do m:n connections with intermediate inline tables.
https://docs.typo3.org/typo3cms/extensions/irre_tutorial/0.4.0/Manual/Index.html#intermediate-tables-for-m-n-relations
Depends on the issue, sometimes the intermediate table is an entity, sometimes not. In this example the intermediate table is the track, which would contain: [uid, cd, song, track_no, ... (whatever else needed to define the track)]
Be carefull when you define your data, that you do not make it too advanced.
I just wanted to validate my data structure.
It seems a bit convoluted to me, maybe it can be simplified?
Questions are grouped into chapters.
For each question, only one answer per session is possible.
The purpose is to be able to compare / analyze answers to the same questions (by different users or by the same users at different times, i.e. with different sessions).
A template, being a collection of chapters & questions, should not have to be replicated, if chapters and questions are the same.
(That would be necessary if Answer did not have a relationship to Session.)
Is the relationship from Answer back to Session the right strategy?
What else would you improve to simplify the model?
Thank you!
EDIT
Follow-up clarification:
The Answer is not static (e.g. "right" answer, "solution"), but some text the user inputs. It is more like a "questionnaire" than a "quiz". The answer has quantitative attributes that can be analyzed.
As stated, one question can have only one answer within a session. Because questions can indirectly belong to more than one session (via (NSSet*) question.chapter.template.sessions), they could have more than one answers and thus need a to-many relationship.
The typical scenario: User starts a new session with a certain template and fills out the answers. Then he can look at the analysis of the results and compare those with the results of other sessions that use the same template.
EDIT 2
The snapshot of the data model including attributes
honestly, this is what I would do instead of your structure, but I don't know what the purpose of the each entity because I'm not able to find out from their simple names.
this is just an idea to resolve the loop.
you can still reach all templates and all answers from the session, not directly but it does not make your life much harder.
UPDATE:
at the first and second sight, for me, it seems the Session entity is just an extra entity only here. honestly you would not need it, if you concatenate with the Template (aka Questionnaire) entity.
you have to add a many-to-many relationship between the Template and User (you can do it, don't worry about it). using this way, from each template you can reach all answers as well, and you won't have any loop.
Despite the really helpful effort by the part of #holex - the best way still seems to be to stick with my design. The simplifications I had hoped for have not materialized.
I like knockoutjs, the sooner we get rid of coding directly toward the DOM the better. I'm having trouble understanding how I would do something which I'm going to explain in terms of a question/answer site. (This is probably a general MVC/MVVM question)
In my data model I have a question[id, description] and answer[id, question_id, text]. The browser requests a list of questions which is bound to a tbody, one column will display the question description, while the other should be bound to an answer textbox.
One obvious way of doing this is to have a QuestionAnswer[question_id, answer_id, question_descrition, answer_text] model. Ideally I'd like to keep them separate to minimize transformation when sending/receiving/storing, if there isn't some way of keeping them separate then I have the following question:
Where is the ideal place to create the QuestionAnswer model ? My bet is that by convention its created on the server.
If there is such an example somewhere please point me to it, otherwise I think it would make a good example.
Please help me wrap my head around this, Thanks!
What you could do is to create the combined model on the server, serialize it to json and then use the mapping plugin to add the serialized list to the view model.
I'm doing that here only it isn't a combined model, but shouldn't make any difference. Especially since it seems like your relation is one-to-one.
If you need to create an "object" in your view model, you can use the mapping definition to do so, like I do here.
I use C# to build my model on the server, but I guess you can use whatever you are comfortable with.
The cool thing with the mapping plugin is that it adds the data to the view model so that you can focus on behaviour.
Ok,
I'v gathered my thoughts on what my question is actually asking.
To do data binding on the client side you obviously need your data model there as well. I was conflicted on what I needed to send over and at what time.
To continue with the Question/Answer site idea: Sending down a list of answers each of which have a question in them is what should be done. That way you can bind to the answer list and simply bind the question description of each answer to the first table column.
If later I want to make a question editor I would potentially send a complete different data structure down and not reuse the Answer has a Question structure previously used.
I thought there might be a way of sending down a more complex data structure that references itself. Which apparently is possible in JSon with some extra libraries.
These day I work with a database that have this style of relationship then I've been very confused with it. This database is in a very large web app & have worked well for 10 years then I wonder whether this design is good in someway? or in which situations I should implement it?
Welcome any idea!
There is nothing wrong in my opinion. You can have, for example, in a personal_data table a place_of_birth field and a place_of_living field both referring to a cities table. By the way you should post a more meaningful example to have a more precise answer.
I'm new to Workflow Foundation. I've worked my way through one book (K. Scott Allen's Programming Windows Workflow Foundation) which was okay but I'm left with several questions. The biggest one is 'where do I put the data'?
Throughout the book he uses the idea of a Bug Tracking system; the scenario isn't too far from what I want to do. His examples use a simple Bug class with three properties and nothing else and he just makes it a field on his activities and passes it around where necessary. But in the real world a bug report would probably have lines of text that you'd want to be searchable; my scenario certainly does. If all of this text is squirrelled away by the persistence service, how do I get at it for text searches?
In the real world, what do you do with your data?
For simple keys or assciated foreign keys you can use the tracking service to store such key/value pairs in the database too and query them later by using the tracking information in the tracking tables.
For full text search you can store the data in additonal tables you are creating side-by-side to the original tables of the sql-persistence-service. You have to manually add and delete them in case of workflow ending or error.