[plug] Data Abstraction

[James Devenish]

In message <1071642942.22241.133.camel at latte.internal.itmaze.com.au>
on Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 05:35:43PM +1100, Onno Benschop wrote:
> Any comments?

I should not be here.

> An item contains one or more descriptors.
> A descriptor refers to one blob.
> A blob may be referred to by one or more descriptors.
[...]
> When I create a map, I don't know yet if the blobs can be stored, nor do
> I know what name they'll get until I store them. Thus I cannot generate
> the HTML for the roll-over until I've stored the blob.

So...create the map *after* all the blobs are saved. I'm missing the
problem, aren't I?

Are you needing a way to determine *when* the map can be created, or are
you having a problem referring to blobs from descriptors when the blobs
are unsaved? Or do items already contain object references to
descriptors, and descriptors contain object references to blobs, but you
don't want to iterate through the blobs to determine when they've been
saved?

> I don't want to store the blob directly, I need to do it via the
> descriptors, because they contain the actual information about each blob
> and their relationship to the item.

Do descriptors/blobs refer to the item/descriptor, or is it strictly
Item's descriptor_id -> Descriptor's blob_path -> Blob's data?