[Rt-devel] Why does ObjectCustomFieldValues store Select values' names rather than IDs?

[Jim Meyer]

Hello!

A separate question first: I did a short writeup of the relationship
between the CF, CFV, OCF, and OCFV tables once I understood it. I didn't
(and still don't) see anything in the wiki that discusses this. Would it
be useful for me to put my writeup in there and, if so, where?

On Tue, 2005-10-11 at 12:33, Jesse Vincent wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Oct 11, 2005 at 12:05:28PM -0700, Jim Meyer wrote:
> > Hello!
> > 
> > [This is in a 3.4.x instance; I've not verified this in a 3.5.x instance
> >  as yet, but will do so later this week]
> > 
> > The subject says it all. I don't understand why, for Select-type CFs,
> > selection names are stored as text in the Content column of the OCFV
> > table rather than as the selection's CustomFieldValues ID.
> 
> Because otherwise it becomes basically impossible to switch select
> custom fields to entry custom fields. And the search logic would get
> even more complex. We debated long and hard about this one.  I'd
> certainly love to see a proposed patch to make it easier to rename
> values sanely.

Thanks for the quick explanation! That makes it all make sense and I
definitely see your point regarding the search logic. I was not/am not
looking forward to that part. I also very much appreciate the congruency
of select and entry CFs as it makes what I'm attempting much more
straightforward than it might have been.

We're messing about with a tagging mechanism (aka folksonomy) which
would allow users to arbitrarily add new keywords after first validating
them against existing keywords (as well as dictionary words) to reduce
the incidence of "broken"/"borken"/"fubar"/"foobar"/etc.

To do this, we're pondering creating a new CF type, FreeSelect, which
behaves as an "Enter Many" (Freeform) as far as the user is concerned
but is stored as a "Select Many" (Select) as far as the code is
concerned.

It seems that the proliferation of similar tags would be very likely, so
I was trying to find an easy way to administer them by merging them
together (again, a la tickets). Unfortunately, leaving it as is seems to
make that very difficult or perhaps impossible.

I'll ponder further. If anyone has a thought or two, please feel free to
share. =]

Thanks!

--j
-- 
Jim Meyer, Geek at Large                                    purp at acm.org