I'm playing around with a workout app (android), and want to match workouts to dates. The basic structure is :
Each date has zero or one workouts.
Each workout has one or more exercises.
Each exercise has a name, and one or more sets.
Each set has a weight, and one or more repetitions.
I'm considering a json file, where:
Each date attribute has a list of exercise objects.
Each exercise object has a name, and a list of set objects.
Each set object has a weight attribute and a repetitions attribute.
Thoughts?
If you are doing it with Android, use clases to represent the different entities you have mentioned.
To persist the information inside the phone, I sugest you use the built in sqlite database.
If you plan to build the app as the front end for a rest api or webservice, then yes you can use a json file to exchange informtion with the server. Now, on the server, you would persist the data in a database of your choice. I would go with a relational database like mysql, but for the model you are proposing it would be feasable to also go with a Nosql alternative.
Related
I'm trying to write microservices in Java. I've implemented GraphQL endpoints using graphql-spring-boot-starter.
Now I have a problem how to make it efficient.
Datamodel is like a tree and I need to query for data from multiple services at once. The problem is how to filter for a member of collection, something like CONTAINS in database, but data is not in separate table, but separate microservice. Maybe the problem is that domain is not correctly splitted between services?
Let's make an example: I have 3 microservices: users, libriaries, books. Every library have collection of users and books (just list of identifiers, like foreign keys). Every book has a name and genre. Every library have lists of books borrowed by user (identifiers too).
Question 1 - should library hosts list of books and users (just identifiers, like foreign keys)? Is it correct approach?
Question 2 - I want to find libraries in which specified users (by surname) have borrowed books of specified genre. Going from top I need to first find libraries containing users. Not easy, as we have names in different service. We need to query first for users, gathers their identifiers, and now we are able to query for libraries. But it isn't all. Now we need to find books for every user and check genres - in different service. And it's not all. I want to have everything presented in nice way, so whole output should be sorted and paged. It force me to collect all data from all services, then page and sort it, which of course will not be efficient.
Please don't concentrate on this example, I'm looking how to solve general approach, not this one example. I've tried to use Datafetchers but it's troublesome and there are not good examples of calling Graphql-to-GraphQL. Most examples covers calling REST endpoints etc.
I want to create a membership based site in Umbraco 7, following the umbraco.tv videos and reading through the docs have got me quite far.
My members will have custom properties, firstname, lastname, favourite colours, hats owned etc. I have been adding each of these as custom properties and then assigning them to the tab I want. This works fine and I can then access them from code using:
Members.GetCurrentMember().GetProperty("lastname").Value.ToString();
When I looked in my database I noticed that each of these custom properties is a row in the cmsPropertyData table, linked to the cmsMember table by the nodeId column. Is there a way I can set all of this information to store in it's own table?
Ideally, I want each Member to have a one to many relationship with favourite colours, as well as one to many relationships with other tables; each member might have 100 hats for example. What is the best way for me to set this up? Shall I create custom tables in my Umbraco database for HatsOwned and FavouriteColours, then assign each Member a unique ID so I can set my foreign keys up correctly? That way I would only need to store the Members Unique Id in the cmsPropertyTable. Is there a better way to let Umbraco deal with it? Would I have difficulty retrieving Members using either the Umbraco orm, or EF?
Any help or pointers greatly appreciated!
I would store all data in the PROFILE of the member, in the umbraco membership. E.g. timezone, hair color, ... This makes sense for other developers to find back the data.
For all other data, you have a few options:
Relationships
If you want to link nodes to members, or nodes to nodes, or... Relations link 2 umbraco entities and can be one way or two way. If you have a color node, you can link all members to this node. Just create a "favoriteColor" relationship on the developer section, linking up nodes to members. Do some programming and you are done. Don't forget that a relation is a database record linking 2 umbraco entities. So think of some caching if you use this in your front end to take off some database load. Read more on the Relationship Api in the umbraco documentation.
Content
It's pretty easy to create new nodes using code to store e.g. comments on an article. Because you are republishing the xml cache every time you create (and publish) a node, don't use content nodes for stroring your data if you have a lot of updates.
External data
It is perfectly legit to store data outside of umbraco. Just create your own tables (or content to any service you created). You could use every ORM you want to, but I would recommend PetaPoco. The reason is obvious. Umbraco uses it also. And it will make you a better Umbraco developer. There is a detailed post on stackoverflow on how to work with external data in umbraco.
I am working on a MVC3 code first web application and after I showed the first version to my bosses, they suggested they will need a 'spare' (spare like in something that's not yet defined and we will use it just in case we will need it) attribute in the Employee model.
My intention is to find a way to give them the ability to add as many attributes to the models as they will need. Obviously I don't want them to get their hands on the code and modify it, then deploy it again (I know I didn't mention about the database, that will be another problem). I want a solution that has the ability to add new attributes 'on the fly'.
Do any of you had similar requests and if you had what solution did you find/implement?
I haven't had such a request, but I can imagine a way to get what you want.
I assume you use the Entity Framework, because of your tag.
Let's say we have a class Employee that we want to be extendable. We can give this class a dictionary of strings where the key-type is string, too. Then you can easily add more properties to every employee.
For saving this structure to the database you would need two tables. One that holds the employees and one that holds the properties. Where the properties-table has a foreign-key targeting the employee-table.
Or as suggested in this Q&A (EF Code First - Map Dictionary or custom type as an nvarchar): you can save the contents of the dictionary as XML in one column of the employee table.
This is only one suggestion and it would be nice to know how you solved this.
How should one structure validation, preparation and arrangement (etc) of data before dealing with the DB?
The data I expect to be passed might need to be validated (ex: category books actually exists) or contain conditional values (ex: sale price should only be set if ad = sale) or values that must be converted to ids (ex: category books must be converted to category_id 123).
I imagine that there are numerous ways to go about this like clumping everything together, grouping by field (do validation, prep etc together per field) or separating by action (validation, prep, etc) and field.
Are there any concepts when it comes to this topic just like the concept of MVC exists? Achieving flexibility, ease of maintenance or something like that?
Anything relating to common used components of model?
(I'm not sure if it helps but I'm currently using CodeIgniter / PHP)
In codeigniter, you can use the Form_Validation class with a callback method that you create. http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/libraries/form_validation.html#callbacks.
In your callback method you can check to see if things exist in database, etc.
I'm about to embark on a project where a user will be able to create their own custom fields. MY QUESTION - what's the best approach for something like this?
Use case: we have medical records with attributes like first_name, last_name etc... However we also want a user to be able to log into their account and create custom fields. For instance they may want to create a field called 'second_phone' etc... They will then map their CRM to their fields within this app so they can import their data.
I'm thinking on creating tables like 'field_sets (has_many fields)', 'fields', 'field_values' etc...
This seems like it would be somewhat common hence why I thought I would first ask for opinions and/or existing examples.
This is where some modern schemaless databases can help you. My favourite is MongoDB. In short: you take whatever data you have and stuff a document with it. No hard thinking required.
If, however, you are in relational land, EAV is one of classic approaches.
I have also seen people do these things:
predefine some "optional" fields in the schema and use them if necessary.
serialize this optional data to string (using JSON, for example) and write it to text blob.