Howdy,
Is there a PDF on data relationships and how to create/manage them? We need to squirt a whole bunch of data and display them (something like http://refold.med.monash.edu.au) but I’m having trouble seeing this bit in the docos.
Basically some fields have things much like Country->State relationships, so select Australia, we need a list of Australian states appearing, or if they select USA the US States appear for another selection item.
Is it true - this is what a co-worker mentioned - that we simply design our data model in MSM and it will work it out for us or do we have the option of querying our own data (via your Pear DBO interop layer)?
Is there any specific part/function on that site do you want to implement? Doing the whole thing in matrix (the complex relationships and graphs etc) would be truly epic. Probably look into using asset builders, data records, metadata and search (data records are not in GPL version). Custom forms might also work for you, but it's probably harder to manage the data afterwards. Once you have the data inside matrix you can display it using asset listings and paint layouts.
The data record is then basically a record (der) and the metadata are your fields, and asset listings are search results with a preset query. The relationships can probably mainly be mapped with type 2 links…at the moment I can't think of a good way to automatically create all of these links, these are some things to try for a proof of concept anyway.
Yes, you can also query your own data with Db data source asset…but if it were me doing that I would probably just use a framework like ruby on rails 
Lexicon is possibly your pal here too. You can define terms and relationships with the Thesaurus and Thesaurus Term assets and use these to do some magical things.
Knowing precisely what it is you want to do would be the handiest thing though.
Hi,
Thanks for the replies.
Basically we have quite a few thousand documents that were designed by engineers yonks ago that need to be 'digitalised', cataloged and setup so people can see the info, search etc - so bringing them from the dark ages of paper weights to the slick new (but so 1990s) world of the internets. MSM was selected so we can bring it to the 2008 era.
A Simple example would be something like this, take a university course setup system for instance:
Field Of Study -> Subject Areas
Engineering - Automotive
-> Panel Beating
->Vehicle Painting
-> Motor Mechanics
-> etc etc
Then within each of those 'subject areas' we have info about each course available, teachers, students enrolled, classrooms, lectures, books, etc etc…
Are we beating the wrong horse for this? We just want to make the data entry incredibly usable and easy for our client rather than having to learn a new system - and us having to reinvent the wheel. They also have about 1500-2500 records/pages of data to enter.
I just realised theres a Data SSV module, is this documented somewhere about how this works or how you use it? It might be what we're after ???
I was considering RoR or Django but our client handed MSM to us.