I have a problem naming the elements in my application's data model.
In the application, the user has the possibility to create his own metamodel. He does so by creating entity types and a type defines which properties an entity has. However, there are three kinds of entity types:
There is always exactly one instance of the type.
For instance, I want to model the company I am working for. It has a name, a share price and a number of employees. These values change over time, but there is always exactly one company.
There are different instances of the type, each is unique.
Example: Cities. A city has a name and a population count, there are different cities and each city exists exactly once.
Each instance of the type defines multiple entities.
Example: Cars. A car has a color and a manufacturer. But there is not only one red mercedes. And even though they are similar, red mercedes #1 is different from red mercedes #2.
So lets say you are a user of this tool and you understood the concept of these three flavors. You want to create a new entity type and are prompted to choose between option 1, 2 and 3. How would you name these options?
Edit:
Documentation and help is available to the user. Also the user can be expecteted to have a technical/programming background, so understanding these three concepts should be no problem.
First of all let me make sure I understand the problem,
Here's what you have (correct me if I'm wrong):
#of instances , is/are Unique
(1,true)
(n,true)
(n,false)
If so,
for #of instances I would use single \ plural
for is\are unique (\ not unique) I would use unique \ ununique.
so you'll get:
singleUnique
pluralUnique
pluralUnunique
That's the best I could think of.. I don't know exactly who are your users and what is the environment, But if you have an option of adding tips (or documentation) that should be used for sure.
Related
I have been asked by a customer to develop a "product configurator", and i need some inputs on how to handle the DB part of the project.
Each product can have a subset of different precreated attributes.
The minimum is 1 attribute, but there is no maximum.
Some attributes have dependencies/relationships with other attributes.
Eg. If the product is a chair, you need to choose the material (wood, plastic, metal), and you need to choose which type of legs the chair shoud have.
If the Product is a cabinet, you still need to choose a material, but instead of legs there will be different doors to choose from etc.
Each of these attributes might have subattributes. Eg. the door has a color, a size and a doorhandle.
Then the door handle has a material, a type and so on.
This ultimatly ends up in a multi-layered attribute-tree.
By itself this isnt too complicated to code, however the customer wants to be able to manage (Create, update and delete) all products, attributes and relationships between attributes, within the webapp.
So coding the relationship-part isn't a viable solution.
I have gone with a EAV model to facilitate the "potential unlimited" amount of attributes each product can have.
But i am struggling to figure out how to go about the "attribute relationships".
A simplified version of my DB design looks like this:
If each product could subscribe to groups of attributes that is legal. Then each attribute belongs to a group like "wood group".
Then the user could set the groups of attributes against a product that should need to be answered to configure a product.
With regards managing a tree, you could use a column type of hierarchyid . Or construct an outline string as key field.
An outline for example
1.
1.1.
1.1.1.
1.2.
2.
2.1.
I'm a bit confused with Sqlite, Core Data, NSUserDefaultsand PropertyList. I know what is what, but not a very clear idea of about where to appropriately use them.
I know that there are lots of tutorials, but I'm good at learning through situation based understanding. So kindly do help me to understand this in the situation that I'm facing right now and to make use of the available options wisely.
I'm working on an ECommerce iOS (native) application, where I'm highly dependent on API's for data display. Now I'm in need of recording user's review for a product and send it over through an API.
ie. I have three components, rating title, rating value(for that title) and another rating title ID. I'm defining with an example, I need to store multiple rows with details,
Components Data to be stored
**Title** - Quality | Value | Price
| |
**Rating** - 2 | 3 | 1
| |
**TitleID** - 10 | 11 | 12
Like this, there will be so many entries, i.e, the number of components differs for various users, for some users, there might be more than three components, which must be saved & send through an API. So how should I save these data? which is the RIGHT way to save these data temporarily?
If I understand you correctly, as vaibhav implied your question seems pretty general and probably relates more to structuring your data to fit your requirements than to technical aspects of the iOS / CoreData environment. In that vein, I’ll offer a few thoughts I’d have in structuring a data structure for quality ratings per your description.
If your ratings will always be for the three categories you show, i.e. Quality, Value and Price, I wouldn’t over-complicate things; I’d just use three properties in a rating record to hold the values that a user assigns in his/her rating of a product (just showing selected attributes and relationships in all following lists):
Product
name
Rating
ratedProduct (many to one)
qualityRating Int
valueRating Int
priceRating Int
Done this way you’d need to associate the values with their types in code for the APIs, such as (where item is a retrieved rating record):
display(product: item.ratedProduct.name, quality: item.qualityRating, value: item.valueRating, price: item.priceRating).
On the other hand, you may be describing a more generic approach that would allow for ratings categories that vary more frequently, or perhaps vary among products. This could apply where, for example, ratings include how well things fit for clothing but not for other products like books. In that case, you’d need a more complicated structure where a product could have a variable number of ratings of different types, so you’d need another layer of entities that let you create an arbitrary number of rating records that applied to a product.
Here you'd create a separate rating record for each rating that a user assigned to a product.
The simplest form of that structure would be like the following:
Product
name String
UserEvaluation
ratedProduct (many to one)
productRating (one to many)
ProductRating
ratingType (many to one)
value Int
RatingType
ratingTitle String
ratingID String or Int
Then you’d have to have a bit more structure where you'd list the product and then access the ratings with a loop that cycled through the set of all of the ratings linked to the product record somewhat like this (where item is a retrieved UserEvaluation):
displayTitle(product: item.ratedProduct.name)
for rating in item.productRating {
displayRating(ratingTitle: item.productRating.ratingType.title, ratingValue: item.productRating.value)
}
You'd probably want to combine these into a method that takes the name and an array of ratings.
To keep track of things, you’d also probably want to create another entity that defined product classes and specified what specialized ratings applied to each class (like fit for clothing and mileage for cars). By default, you also may want to allow for a few generic rating types that apply to all products (like the quality and price ratings you show). For this approach, the full structure would look like this:
Product Category
title
ratingType (many to many)
Product
productType (many to one)
UserEvaluation
ratedProduct (many to one)
productRating (one to many)
ProductRating
ratingType (many to one)
value Int
RatingType
ratingTitle String
ratingID String or Int
With this structure, once a product is assigned a productType, the application would know what ratings to ask for in the UI.
You could try building more complicated rating records with all of the types that apply to a product category, but that would get very messy if the applicable categories vary over time. You could also create a "custom" rating type that let a user specify a title and input a rating, in which case you'd need a text field in the rating record that only applies if the ratingType is "custom".
I hope this helps…
For structured data, can alternateName be used more than once on a single thing?
Yes, every property can be used multiple times.
You could even provide multiple name properties, but it might make sense to use one name property (for the canonical/official name) and one or more alternateName properties for all other names.
Examples: Person with several name, Product with several color, Offer with several priceSpecification, item with several additionalType.
I am building a "Survey" type application. The user answers a set of questions with pre-vetted answers.
Question: Where do you live?
Answers: England, Finland, Spain, France, Monrovia
The answers in this case would be in a DropDownList.
Once the user has completed the basic responses (location, age, sex etc) I would like to be able to prevent them accessing the rest of the survey based on their answers.
So for example, if they live anywhere but England I want to direct them to a page which says "Thanks, but Monrovian's can't complete this survey". I need my filtering to be user configurable (Table based) and I need to be able to have ANDs and ORs.
So one filter being the user MUST earn 100k+ a year.
Another being they must either live in Spain, or be female AND like model trains - "100k+ && (Spain || (Female && Trains))"
I would usually use Enums and bitmasking for this, but as my country list is 200+ items long, I can't think of a sensible way to store the filtering.
Hopefully I have made some sense and someone has a decent solution :)
I don't know if I can answer your question completely, but I'll try...
So, we have a bunch of Views that are only visible to the user if she previously chose some answers, like, she will see view#3 if she is older that 30, and view#4 if she is younger than 30 AND from China, and view#5 if she is older than 40 AND from Spain OR Italy, and so on...I want also to introduce the notion of **step**, and for each step we could have 1, 2, or more corresponding views. Each view should have a set of rules (like the ones above) that define if it is displayed or not.
How to create these rules? These rules could be simple instances of a Filter class/interface that, when asked, should return true/false. Like this:
interface Filter {
boolean apply();
}
Then you can create Filters like 'older than 30', 'from Spain', whatever. Remember that each view is configured with a set of rules (Filters) so it can answer yes/no if asked if it can display itself.
Next, how to apply these filters?
We could have a controller object that only knows about **steps** (each step can have one or more corresponding views, as I said), and, after the user pressed **next** at the current step, it should collect the answers and apply them against the rules attached to each view. Like, take the answers from step one, and apply them to all views from step two, and see which one matches (returns true). For example, at step two, you can have two separate views, one for young people, other for old people, and you apply the rules from each view to decide if you show the old or young view.
I could give you one code example, and you could also do research on your own, since I know nothing about your technical environment. I have used Google Guava's predicates on a similar problem and here it is: suppose we are dealing with Witch objects, and each of them has name(string), age(int) and spells(collection) attributes. If I have a list of witches and I need to sort them based on specific criteria, I can do:
// first I want to sort witches by age(natural ordering) then by spells,
// and then by name lexicographically
Ordering.natural()
.compound(new BySpellsWitchOrdering())
.compound(new ByNameWitchOrdering())
.sortedCopy(witchList);
The above line of code is going to take the witch list and return a list of sorted witches according to the criteria. Your situation is pretty similar.
Next, how to create the answers? For each view(page), you have possible answers, like, for view#1, you can have : age, sex, race, country. You can construct some answers, in the form of strings, ints, enums, and pass them to the controller, which in turn is going to apply them to each view corresponding to the next step.
As for how to store the rules in the database, as an example, you could have a column defining rule name (like, OLDER THAN) and one column for value, say, 30. Again, I do not know that much about your environment, and it is a really general issue, so I will stop here...
I am interested in the implementation of the search engine in autoscout24.de. It is a platform where you can sell/buy cars. Every car advert has properties: make, price, kilometers, color, etc. (in sum over 50 different properties) that can be searched for.
I am specifically interested in the detail search that works like this: every possible property is displayed on the page. In brackets behind each property there is the number of cars that will match the new search if the property is selected.
Example: I'll start with empty search criterias.
Property make:
BMW (100.000)
Volkswagen (200.000)
Ford (150.000)
...
Property color:
black (210.000)
silver (50.000)
white (100.000)
...
and so on for the other properties.
I'd like to know:
How would you implement this kind of search with SQL?
How would you implement it with an in-memory data structure?
Range queries should be supported, too (all cars with price from X to Y)
Update:
The numbers in brackets show the number of results after the addition of the search criteria. So it changes each time a property is added / removed...
So a naive algorithm would work like this:
find all cars with current search criteria (e.g. make Ford)
for each property do: find all cars that matches previous search criteria ("Ford") AND the search criteria for the chosen property. Write the count in brackets behind the property.
This algorithm is naive because it would execute 1 + N queries (N=#properties). Nobody wants to do that ;-)
I believe that this is referred to as "faceted search". The Apache Solr project might be worth looking at.
It's a basic code
Create a result object with one counter for each property that the cars have
Check all cars one by one, if the car match the filter then add one to each of the numbers
...But it's blasting fast !
I think they do it on several computers, shreading data across them. Each computer compute 5% of the data and send the result to the front computer wich sum all counts.
There are tools for that : look for "map reduce", "elastic search", "strom"...
Have a properties table:
+Properties
id
title
value
count
The count field allows you to "earn" an extra query , so instead of checking how much cars have a certain property , you can just update this field when adding new cars.
Example of rows in this table:
1 'color' 'white' 1000
2 'color' 'black' 122
3 'km' '5000' 1233
4 'km' '30000' 54
And for the cars table , for each property add a field.
+Cars
id
color
km
and the color and km fields will hold the ID's of the property's row in the Properies table.
EDIT: if you're planning not to use mysql db , you might consider using XML files to contain the properties data. But once again, you should update its count value anytime you add / remove or update a car.
<Properties>
<Property>
<Type>Color</Type>
<Value>White</Value>
<Count>1000</Count>
</Property>
</Properties>