Re: Need conceptual modelling advice
Re: Need conceptual modelling advice
- Subject: Re: Need conceptual modelling advice
- From: Samuel Pelletier <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 29 Sep 2015 16:22:09 -0400
Hi Markus,
First thing, like René wrote, make sure you have a single Product entity to create a master product list. All the documentation and attributes will be linked to this one. Product availability is not merged with product documentation.
I usually solve this kind of problems by creating an entity for the Region and move all the product documentation (documents and attributes) to a distinct entity that relate to product, region and some sort of attribute definition.
The attribute definition is a list of possible attributes (name, length, spec sheet, import papers, color, photo, etc...)
With this structure, you can add any number of attribute and any number of region to your system by simply adding a row to the database...
Entity Product
- id
- name
- ....
Entity Attribute (Usually with a subclass for each type)
- id
- name
- type (length, text, file, photo, ...)
Entity Region
- id
- name
Entity ProductAvailability
- ProductID
- RegionID
- beginDate
Entity ProductValue
- productID
- attributeID
- regionID
- textValue
- numericValue
- dataValue
If this apply to you, you can even define a lookup order for each region to reduce data duplication. The order tell the system to check another region for a missing attribute value for example, if value not found in US, check EU, ...
You can handle the language localization by creating more specific region like CanadaFrench and CanadaEnglish so the same structure will also solve this problem.
You can extend this base by adding rules to product category (or region for example) for example that define mandatory attributes.
Samuel
> Le 2015-09-29 à 11:35, Markus Ruggiero <email@hidden> a écrit :
>
> Hi WOnderers,
>
> I am in need for some coneptual modelling advice. Let me try to explain what I want:
>
> I am working on a product database application. Each product has a couple of attributes like product code, name, etc. For each prodcut we also have a set of electronic documents like spec sheet(s) and regulatory data. All these documents are built from a set of predefined standard text elements.
>
> The customer today deploys this application for different geographical regions (EU, USA, etc). The code and the database structure is the same for every region. The app can handle some minor regional differences in processing (the app kows for which region it is installed). However the data is partially region specific. Some products are not available everywhere, some textblocks have region specific text and some product attributes might have region specific values (e.g. the product name could have a regional tint as well as other attributes might have region specific values). Every user of the application has an assigned region. The split deployment as of today makes region specifics completely transparent. The problem is that there will be more and more regions and the global product data management becomes a PITA with all the duplicated databases.
>
> What we need tomorrow is ONE code and ONE database that allows for regional variations depending on the logged-in user. We could have regional variants of product data, regicon specific products, region sepcific product catalogs, region specific documentation per product, etc. The customer wants to be able to "switch region" for a super user so the global, non-region-specific stuff can be maintained centrally.
>
> How would you model such a beast? I want this to be as transparent as possible to the code of the app (and to me as the programmer). So the region layer should be implemented as low as possible.
>
> Thanks for any input
> ---markus---
>
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