Apple

Hi Calven,

Our GVC.SiteMaker application had some features that you might find useful. https://sourceforge.net/projects/gvcsitemaker/

It has a feature “Virtual Tables” that let’s user create relational tables and user defined UIs. It is fully KVC compatible and reasonably fast. It does come with a robust set of limitations :-) like no indexes o unique constraints. Virtual Tables is an independent WO framework, but the UI part is embedded in the GVC.Sitemaker code. I am not sure how much effort it would be to rip out, er, repurpose. All of the default values, non-null validations, etc are in the UI as only a few actual tables are used to implement VirtualTables.

The University of Michigan used it campus wide until last year. They managed to do some pretty extensive things with it, things that I never imagined would be done.

The only other way to do what you want fully open ended is to make on-the-fly changes to the database schema or use a No SQL data store and then you still have to deal with generating the UI. If you can constrain the path and activities to a known set of options, then it is much easier to make something user extensible.

Chuck

From: <webobjects-dev-bounces+chill=email@hidden> on behalf of Calven Eggert <email@hidden>
Date: Wednesday, June 22, 2016 at 8:33 AM
To: WebObjects-Dev <email@hidden>
Subject: Design Ideas?

Hi all,

My question is not simply a WO question, however, perhaps the WO experts have a best practice way of doing this in WOnder.

I've been asked to design an application that tracks a process that a patient goes through, with the following:

1. Each patient will follow one of many different paths.

2. Each path consists of a number of activities and the order of the activities along that path.

3. At the moment there are 3 different paths and 15 different kinds of activities. Each activity has different fields to store in the database. (Approx. 5 fields per activity X 15 activities = 75 fields)

It would be great if the application could be designed so that new paths/activities can be created by the user in an administration section, as opposed to having the developer create new versions of the application each time a new path/activity needs to be created. Right now, I'm prepared to soldier through and simply design it so that there is 1 table for each activity. I've looked at creating a generic table that has many string fields and then storing the field type, etc, however, this seems like way too much work (validation, etc.). Also thought about one activity table but 75 fields sounds unmanageable plus the fact that there will be more activities added in the next year.

Anyone else out there have a different solution or idea?

Calven

References:
	>Design Ideas? (From: Calven Eggert <email@hidden>)