Custom fields schema

[Myk Melez]

Maxwell Kanat-Alexander wrote:

>On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 07:28 +0200, Vlad Dascalu wrote:
>  
>
>>I agree with Myk. The FAC proposal makes more sense for me, from all 
>>points of view.
>>    
>>
>
>	I also used to think so.
>
>	But if we want people to be able to write "plugins" for Bugzilla,
>Fields-As-Rows makes much more sense.
>  
>
Plugins can be roughly divided into three categories:

    * add no new fields (NNF), just manipulate existing ones (f.e. a
      plugin that added a "checked in" comment and resolved bugs "FIXED"
      when a patch on them was checked into a source control system);
    * add new generic fields (NGF) that don't need to be manipulated
      specially and can be implemented using custom fields;
    * add new special fields (NSF) that need to be manipulated specially
      and cannot be implemented using custom fields (f.e. Test Runner
      <http://sourceforge.net/projects/testrunner/>);

Of these, only NGF plugins can use custom fields, and if a plugin just 
creates a custom field and then lets the generic custom field code 
handle interaction with it, then why take the trouble to make it a 
plugin?  It'd be much easier for installations that want the 
functionality to just define the custom field themselves using whatever 
interface we develop for managing custom fields.

I think very few, if any, plugins will create custom fields.  But even 
if some did (f.e. a plugin that created a bunch of related custom fields 
which would otherwise be burdensome to create by hand via the interface, 
or a plugin which reused most generic custom fields code but with a few 
special tweaks), why does FAD make more sense for them?  Real columns 
are as easy to create programmatically, keep plugin data more separate 
from standard and installation-defined custom field data, and can be 
made more secure if necessary (by giving plugins a MySQL account that 
only permitted write access to its own tables).

-myk

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bugzilla.org/pipermail/developers/attachments/20050125/79b6c75a/attachment.html>