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<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Hi,<br>
<br>
thank you for your detailed reply, Jonathan.<br>
<br>
What kind of metadata </font><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">do</font><font
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> you store in the dedicated XML
content type?<br>
<br>
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 </font><font
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">integrity </font><font
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">checking</font><font
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> for the </font><font
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">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 </font><font
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">concurrency bottleneck </font><font
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">in my multi-user scenario.<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
However, this approach does not provide automatic referential integrity
checking either. For the case of </font><font
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">change to </font><font
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
<br>
Christoph<br>
</font><br>
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