[Registry-dev] Re: switching data sources

[Paul Fremantle]

I would rather we had a clean registry and a simple example import, and 
also simple instructions on how to clean up/refresh. That teaches users 
how to do imports, etc.

I guess I think this feature is maybe just a bit wierd in a real life 
case. I can't imagine any user using this in a real scenario which is 
what worries me.

Paul

Sanjiva Weerawarana wrote:
> Paul Fremantle wrote:
>>> That's not answering the question Deepal .. I think the concern is 
>>> that if you change the underlying DB by mistake you're, um, screwed.
>>>
>>> I guess you really aren't - if you switch and switch back effectively 
>>> you've just "connected" to an existing registry datastore. So in 
>>> effect the UI is somewhat de-coupled from the underlying datastore.
>>
>> I still don't understand the usecase for this. I hate having "cool" 
>> features that don't have a use-case. And this seems like one of them. 
>> This is what I expect to be in a config file and I don't expect to 
>> change it often.
> 
> OK so here's the history of this: we want to ship a nice sample right? 
> At the same time, we don't want to pre-populate the shipping reg with a 
> bunch of stuff which the user has to delete (which will start their reg 
> in an unclean state as the old stuff would be there). So the idea was 
> why not switch a different database for the sample and just switch 
> to/from that.
> 
> That required a config file somewhere .. which has since found its way 
> into WEBINF somewhere. (Optional, of course.)
> 
> Then do we really need to force users to shutdown, edit the war and 
> restart to switch the DB? Why not just allow the person to edit the 
> config directly.
> 
> So .. that's how we ended up with the one-click data source switching 
> capability :-).
> 
> We this really does feel too powerful then I just realized we could've 
> simply shipped two wars .. reg-sample and reg. One has a virgin database 
> and the other has the sample database. Maybe that's easier and cleaner.
> 
> Sorry; that only occurred to me now :(.
> 
> Sanjiva.

-- 
Paul Fremantle
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OASIS WS-RX TC Co-chair

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