[opencms-dev] Data management for multi-domain regional customerportal

[Christoph Schönfeld]

Hi,

thank you for your detailed reply, Jonathan.

What kind of metadata do you store in the dedicated XML content type?

If one does not use the OpenCms document properties the metadata needs 
to be stored and maintained separate from the documents which sounds 
like a source of error. There is no integrity checking for the links 
from metadata files to documents. Secondly, there are two points of 
change/approval for every new document that is created: the document 
itself and the metadata document. The latter will be a concurrency 
bottleneck in my multi-user scenario.

At first, I had planned to store just the metadata definitions in XML 
files and refer to them in custom document properties. It would be easy 
to build upon and extend OpenCms's integrated search functionality then. 
I would create document properties for topic (main menu structure) and 
subtopic (sub menu structure) for example.

However, this approach does not provide automatic referential integrity 
checking either. For the case of change to metadata definitions the 
existing documents would need to be checked/changed. If the metadata 
document is an OpenCms document as well I can not prevent that it is 
being edited directly.

When I think about all these problems I think it's quite easy to produce 
a mess that way and rather tend to put all metadata in the database. It 
comes with free RI checking. It makes upgrades a bit harder but not 
impossible. I will have to implement the OFFLINE/ONLINE mechanism 
myself. Perhaps I can reuse or extend the OpenCms code to synchronize my 
own OFFLINE/ONLINE tables.


Christoph

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