Do Collections have any special properties?

[Mike Sickler]

How are people using Collections in Daisy? Do they have any special properties that a normal document field doesn't?

Regards,

Mike Sickler

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[A Rocha Webmaster]

Qua, 2009-09-09 às 19:58 -0400, Mike Sickler escreveu:

How are people using Collections in Daisy? Do they have any special properties that a normal document field doesn't?

Collections are a multi-value field. It's built in because the developers thought it would be useful, and it is!

In my case in particular, I run a website for an international organisation and it's 19 national organisations around the world. There are also another four smaller websites run from the same Daisy installation, in all over 5 thousand documents. All of is edited not just by myself, but by over 30 people around the world. I use collections extensively in the Access Control List to define who has the right to edit what part of the website. For instance, I have a 'canada' collection, and a corresponding "Canada Editor" role in the ACL: these people can edit the 'canada' documents, but cannot edit the 'india' documents, for instance.

Hope that helps,

Júlio.
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[Marc Portier]

Júlio Reis wrote:
> Qua, 2009-09-09 às 19:58 -0400, Mike Sickler escreveu:
>> How are people using Collections in Daisy? Do they have any special
>> properties that a normal document field doesn't?
> Collections are a multi-value field. It's built in because the
> developers thought it would be useful, and it is!
>

this is essentially correct, there are however some slight special
interpretations of the collections

* collections are associated to 'sites', which offers some spontanuous
behaviour
   * search is limited to that collection
   * created documents are automatically put in the collection
   * embedded queries (namely in the navigation) can be made to narrow
down to the collection

* adding a new wiki site (through script) will typically create a new
collection (possibly only one for multiple translated versions of the
site though)

* built in search page allows to narrow the resultset to any or more of
these collections

* collections are reported to be more "obscure": people need to goto to
the misc tab before having access to them

* collections are automatically accessile in ACL expressions (other
multivalue fields need explicit "used in ACL" declaration)

* there is a special InCollection(...) syntax in the query language
(whereas fields would need "$name has any (...)")

* you can't choose not to have a 'collections' on your document-type
(but document instances can very well keep it empty)


I'm not trying to argument if any of these are good or bad, they're just
there, and can be applied to your advantage...


As Julio's case pointed out, the ACL cleanlyness often leads to using
collections.

Anyway: if all this theoretical observations don't help you, just let us
know what you are thinking of actually doing, so people around might
reflect on that.

regards,
-marc=

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