Comments on: Post-Design Caucus Meditations http://fmcollective.com/2006/12/02/post-design-caucus-meditations/ Syndicating the best FileMaker blogs Sat, 29 Nov 2008 04:44:04 -0600 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.3 hourly 1 By: Mikhail Edoshin http://fmcollective.com/2006/12/02/post-design-caucus-meditations/comment-page-1/#comment-29 Mikhail Edoshin Fri, 29 Dec 2006 18:56:15 +0000 http://fmcollective.proofgroup.com/?p=18#comment-29 I like the idea very much and I believe there's no need to consider the ‘active students’ table to be a part of the presentation model (as opposed to data model). There's no data model rules except normalization and the scheme fits them pretty well. It's just common to keep such simple attributes in the table, but it's also possible to consider every attribute to be an extension to an otherwise independent record. That is if you had a Person table with names and other stuff that is common to all people and wanted to have a separate table of say, Doctors, you would probably link these two tables to reuse the fields from Person in Doctors. The sample with students is same, but it is an extreme case when the extended variant has only one different attribute. I personally like thinking about this sample in OOP terms: the first object is Student and the second is Active Student which inherits all the properties of the Student and adds its own ‘active’ attribute. I like the idea very much and I believe there’s no need to consider the ‘active students’ table to be a part of the presentation model (as opposed to data model). There’s no data model rules except normalization and the scheme fits them pretty well. It’s just common to keep such simple attributes in the table, but it’s also possible to consider every attribute to be an extension to an otherwise independent record.

That is if you had a Person table with names and other stuff that is common to all people and wanted to have a separate table of say, Doctors, you would probably link these two tables to reuse the fields from Person in Doctors. The sample with students is same, but it is an extreme case when the extended variant has only one different attribute.

I personally like thinking about this sample in OOP terms: the first object is Student and the second is Active Student which inherits all the properties of the Student and adds its own ‘active’ attribute.

]]>