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Harvard-ATG / CampusResources

This is a web application aimed at making it easier for students to find Harvard specific web resources.
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
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Allow "Context" switching would be nice feature #2

Open ShannonRice opened 10 years ago

ShannonRice commented 10 years ago

A really nice enhancement would be to allow context switching. For example, a drop down menu that had selections such as "College Student", "GSAS Student", "Faculty". When you selected one, the set of categories and associated URLs would change.

Ideally all Contexts, and categories could be configured in a database. (which would involve refactoring the data model so that rather than a single table, there are a few tables, mapping categories to URLs, and contexts...

This way we could have a single instance serve various groups within our organization. (and anyone adopting it would also probably find it useful.)

(This would be similar to the way that in Github, if you are associated with an organization(s), you can select, and the projects that display will be driven by that context.)

ShannonRice commented 10 years ago

Here is a proposed data model:

proposeddatamodelforfuture

arthurian commented 10 years ago

This looks good Shannon. One thing I noticed about the proposed model is that it may result in some duplication if two contexts require the same set or subset of categories/links. A category can only belong to one context, and a link can only belong to one category, so if you have two contexts that are almost identical, you would end up with duplicate categories and links.

I think duplicate categories are OK since there are a small number of categories that really aren't going to change very much once they are created (I would guess). However, since the links seem like they would be more likely to change, you might consider a many-to-many relationship between category and link. The result would be one representation of a link that may be shared across contexts. The only instance in which a link might be duplicated in that scheme is if one context wanted the link title/description to be different for the same URL, but I imagine that would be rare.

Also, just curious, but where/how did you upload/store that diagram?

ShannonRice commented 10 years ago

hi Artie, thank you very much. That makes a lot of sense. there may be a collection of links, that we'd want to share. I'll change it so that we can reuse categories across "contexts" in the model (make many to many).

I used OmniGraffle to create the diagram, saved as png, and dragged and dropped to github. (very easy to use this issue tracking tool in git hub.)