dhis2-devs team mailing list archive

[Bob Jolliffe <bobjolliffe@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 16 September 2011 11:23, Morten Olav Hansen <mortenoh@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> A decent recap, Bob and Morten?

Yes thanks for calling in and good recap.  Scope creep on which
objects can have extensible attributes could render it cumbersome
eventually, but while the number of such objects is few it should work
just fine.

One other thing we also discussed was how these attributes would be
serialized to xml.  Given that there is no constraint on the attribute
name which would ensure that it is a 'good' xml element/attribute
name, we can't simply do the natural thing of:

<orgunit>
<name>Bobs Clinic</name>
...
<no_of_beds>0<no_of_beds>
</orginit>

So we will have to do:
<orgunit>
<name>Bobs Clinic</name>
...
<extensionAttributes>
  <attribute name="number of beds">0</attribute>
  <attribute name=...>...</attribute>
</extensionAttributes>
</orginit>

I think this *might* be ok.  As long as it doesn't lead us into the
old mess of having "number of beds", "no of beds" etc as synonyms for
the same thing.  But that's a background worry I have which is more to
do with that we are essentially using name as identifier again, but
maybe I'm worrying too much.  Attribute is an identifiable object so
we could technically improve upon this in time.

Good discussion.  30 minutes.  I hope people didn't think it was a
waste of time.  I'm happy to host another one next week at 09h30 if
anyone has a pressing design issue which might benefit from a run
through.

Cheers
Bob

>
> Yes, that seems to be a good recap. Its good enough.... for now ;)
>
> --
> Morten
>
>> Jo
>