I am in the midst of the implementation of the solution mentioned at the end of sent2null space: objects , abstractions, symmetry and pop corn??? I ran up against an issue that happens occasionally when a modification is made to a class model. You'll recall , I realized that the uniqueness of guest invitations could be used to define the conference type and allow an existing conference to be used as proxy...while investigating deeper, I realized there is no need even for the proxy if I change the structural rules behind the table that tracks conversation participation. In my framework this table is called appropriately the participant_queue it simply lists the attributes of Users engaged in conversations. The database schema for the table enforces referential integrity for a column called conversation_id , in the original implementation of the collaboration API the idea of guest Private messages was not supported, only guest conference users were supported and since a guest to a conference is always joined to an existing conference on the system , referential integrity for conference id's made sense ...but to support guest PM's I could either add a new type and then create new managed conferences for every guest PM request as mentioned in the previous post but this is computationally as well as resource inefficient, especially as large numbers of guest PM requests come in. To allow for efficient guest PM's an unmanaged interaction would be ideal, the solution as mentioned previously was to use the uniqueness of guest pm requests...I realize now that the minimal effort and maximal pay off comes from relaxing the referential integrity constraint of the table column conversation_id and using the existing methods for adding , retrieving and updating conversation rows based on the participant attributes. This single action allows me to readily support the specific symmetry of guest PM's without requiring managed conversations (with valid conversation id's) to be used as proxy, by using zero value conversation id values to correspond to guest PM participant rows in the conversation_id column I can track guest PM's independent of valid managed conversation objects (those with positive integer id values) the drawback to this is only that I have to recompile my existing test instance of the application and reinstall it (strictly speaking I don't since I can modify the constraint via the db admin tool) anyway I decided to just make the change and forgo all the other hassles of needing to update the add, update and retrieval methods of the conversation objects. So this is a perfect example of observing a particular symmetry in action, in this case it is the symmetry of the database schema when the table constraint is in place, I couldn't use negative or zero values...but by relaxing that constraint use of zero or negative values allows me to employ them for the use of the guest PM's which now can be instanced entirely in memory without management resource allocation on the db which is a key drain in performance especially under scaled conditions.
I'll be explaining more about the actual implementation as I role through it in the next few days.
I'll be explaining more about the actual implementation as I role through it in the next few days.
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