Re: [Apc-aa-coders] IDS - maybe a change to make - lets discuss

[Zoltan V. <dr...@zp...>]

>
> $url .= $myid->longid; to return the long id .
> OR
> $url .= $myarray->longid(10); to return the long id of the 10th id in 
> the array
>
> but not requiring
> $url .= $myarray->id(10)->longid.
>
> Am i on the right direction?

Sounds great! I also saw it as a problem that we have all these 
different types of ID's. What is the reason for this, is it historical? 
Shouldn't just short ID's be enough? Or do we need long ID's for 
portability and feeding between databases?

I suppose the difference between quoted packed and unquoted packed is 
that any character can appear in a packed ID, even quotes, so you need 
to addslashes and stripslashes...

Maybe we could do something similar with slice ID's (packed, unpacked, 
quoted, unquoted), and field names (packed, unpacked....)?

I also think this is important because it makes the programming 
interface clearer. During my work for FoEI (I'm just finishing now) we 
tried using APC-AA as a back-end for storing data, and we used a 
different template engine, we haven't used the fulltext view, index 
view, etc. directly. Looking back, I'm not sure that this was a good 
idea, but in the future I'd like to create a kind of API to APC-AA, so 
that it could interoperate more easily with external PHP code. This 
looks like a step in that direction.

BTW one more thing: is there a specific reason why field names _must_ 
be 16 (or however many) characters long? And do they have to have the 
name.............3 syntax with the dots? It annoys me, because whenever 
I need to put the headline field into an inline alias, for example, 
whenever I need to type the field name, I have to copy & paste it from 
the "fields" section of the admin interface - I cannot just type 
"headline.........." because I will surely screw up the number of dots. 
Can't field names be just normal names like "headline", 
"uploaded_image", or whatever?


	cheers!

	Zoltan.