[Cosmo-dev] Stamping Model Concerns

[Randy Letness]

Bobby Rullo wrote:
> I know that we are only supporting a very limited # of stamp types for 
> Preview, but surely we want to storage of arbitrary data with stamp 
> types that a particular Cosmo server has never encountered. The way 
> things are now new tables and classes would (it seems) have to be 
> added, which doesn't seem like a very good solution.
Yep, new stamp types that Cosmo needs to understand would require a new 
class and table.  We can persist arbitrary data using Item attributes, 
but if Cosmo needs to do anything special with the data  then its better 
to break that data out into separate tables where you can optimize 
indexing ,storage, and retrieval based on the type of data.  Also, new 
stamp types are only part of it.  What about new Item types?  Currently 
the Chandler model has ContentItem and a few stamp types, but you could 
also define a new Item type.  Cosmo doesn't have a way to persist 
arbitrary Item types.

Also, theres a trade off when deciding how abstract you want your 
storage model to be.  The more abstract, the more overhead (performance 
hit) required.  Chandler has a pretty abstract way of storing things but 
then again its a single user app and Cosmo needs to support potentially 
thousands of users.

-Randy