[Koha-devel] bumping the authorised_values.category column to 20 chars ?

[Michael Hafen]

Hi,

I'm going to disagree with Galen here.

I prefer to expand an existing table rather than add another when
possible.  This is because more tables adds to the complexity of the
database and the code.  With your suggestion there would have to be
added left joins to a lot of authority code, where otherwise it would be
adding columns to the select or the where clauses.

It would make sense to add a table for authorized value categories if a
category could be in multiple modules, or have multiple descriptions.
The latter obviously isn't likely.  There is the possibility of a
category being in multiple modules, but I think this is handled
effectively by Paul's idea of having the module default to blank.

Unless I'm mistaken proper Database Normalization would have a table
where there is a 'has-a' relation, but not where there is a 'is-a'
relation.  In this case I would say that a category is in a module, and
so there shouldn't be a separate table to define this value.  Please
correct me if I am wrong about this.

Anyway, that my 2 bits.

On Thu, 2008-11-20 at 07:51 -0500, Galen Charlton wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 3:20 AM, Paul POULAIN <paul.poulain at free.fr> wrote:
> > Mason James a écrit :
> >> Hi folks
> >>
> >> Any objections to bumping the authorised_values.category column to
> >> say.. 20 chars??
> >>
> >> I'm having to make my new auth categories a little terse/cryptic
> >> because of the current 10 char limit
> 
> No objection, but note that
> borrower_attribute_types.authorised_value_category would also have to
> be expanded.  To modify the suggestion slightly, how about keeping the
> current length of authorised_value.category and creating a new
> authorised_value_categories table:
> 
> CREATE table authorised_value_categories (
>   category varchar(10) NOT NULL,
>   description varchar(80),
>   module varchar(10),
>   PRIMARY KEY (category),
>   KEY module_idx (module)
> );
> 
> This gives us a longer description, and we can make
> authorised_value.category a foreign key.  The module column would be
> used to implement Paul's idea.
> 
> > I think it's a good idea.
> > Another idea I have would be to add a "module" field, to separate the
> > different uses of auth values :
> > - cataloguing
> > - acquisitions
> > - members
> [snip]
> 
-- 
Michael Hafen
Systems Analyst and Programmer
Washington County School District
Utah, USA

for Koha checkout
http://koha-dev.washk12.org
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