Re: [Phpgroupware-developers] darn near email done, merge notification (fwd)

[Patrick J. Walsh (mr_e)]

> Well ours shall be more too, but maybe not as much as CDB. Anyway, I just
> learned that you know our DB design. Do you think it's so much different
> from CDB that we have to keep both?

	Ah, yes, I've seen the database description that Heiko sent me.  It 
conflicts with my own designs in a number of ways.  For example, it appears 
to allow only one category per contact, whereas cdb will allow multiple 
categories per contact.  Looking at it a little closer now I think I 
understand it a little be better.  It appeared to me before that an 
organization could have only one location, but I think perhaps that is not 
the case.  But how would you pick an address to propagate when 
importing/exporting/syncronizing?  And of course the tables that I am 
looking at are incomplete as they do not have room for phone numbers.

	Also, it is a bit hard to judge how well our two plans would mesh given 
that I am only looking at the database tables.  To some extent, these are 
unimportant.  The API is probably of much greater importance.  I am of the 
somewhat biased opinion that the CDB API is very slick.  It has evolved a 
little bit since the docs, but I think you can get a feel for it by 
browsing here:

http://savannah.gnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/phpgroupware/cdb/inc/
and looking at the files:
class.cdb_contact.inc.php
generic.class.php (which will soon be renamed class.cdb_generic.inc.php)
class.cdb_entity.inc.php

	I will finish with the meta class, hopefully tonight, then move on to the 
address and phone number stuff.  After that I will probably suspend or 
delegate work on the classes and work on 'views,' an API for viewing, 
editing, searching and browsing the data using configurable field sets. 
One view that will be eventually provided is a 'relationship explorer'.

> I still think we should try merging them. It should be much easier now
> than in a few months.

	Have you done any work on this yet?  Besides the database tables?  As far 
as I could tell, the database tables that you sent me don't do anything 
that CDB doesn't already do.  Yours have fewer fields and fewer tables, but 
CDB is intended to be able to grow with any kind of data by plugging in new 
tables.  For example, I would like to add a 'journaling' table that could 
be used to track calls, e-mails and appointments with certain contacts.

	So from what I have here, it doesn't make sense to merge them.  I believe, 
perhaps arrogantly, that CDB is the more solid design and that there is 
little to merge.  Of course, if you have other work done on this, such as 
UI stuff, then there is a potential for merging.

	I've almost solidified how the classes will work (I have just a few more 
minor changes) and once that's done I would love some help fleshing out the 
rest of the classes.  And of course once the views api is done, there will 
be tons of work to do in creating various views and templates.  And then 
there's the ACL stuff, which I haven't fully thought through yet, but which 
someone else could pick up and run with (every attempt to load a contact or 
change a variable results in a call to can_read() or can_write() which 
currently just return TRUE).  There are other things too that we could 
collaborate on.  Let me know how you'd like to proceed.

..Patrick (mr_e)