Media Library: Thinking and Rethinking Identity and Redundancy.

My last post explored a few of my use cases and how they might work… and ended with a situation that puzzled me: how do I resolve the ‘original file name’ of a document file, when I have merged multiple copies of the same document (and file) from different sources? …

Media Library: Simulating Use Cases

A recent post included some quick validation of a tentative design… and failed it! I argue this is a successful validation exercise: if the ‘first-best results’ prove a design or implementation is correct, ‘second-best results’ find a problem before it matters. Second-best results are just fine by me, they me …

Media Library: Revising the Data Model

My previous post, Quick Validation, concluded almost immediately the more abstract model I was considering is not suitable for my purpose here. You might be wondering why. In a relational database, referential integrity is a critical consideration. Normally a table may contain fields defined as ‘pointing at another table’. These …

Media Library: Pondering Abstraction, Possible Disaster

In my last post, regarding Operations, at one point I started to write “and everything can have Tags”… when I realized that can happen, but takes a little extra work. What if they could, though? Early in this series when I wrote about data modeling I recognized that many entities …

Media Library: Just What Metadata Is There?

In looking at the data models, I’ve focused mostly on ‘user-defined columns’ in the expectation that I’d use the same mechanism for ‘built-in columns’. Which raises the possibility of someone taking the library and bending it in strange ways, doing things I had no reason to think they would. If …

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