On 08/13/2015 09:10 PM, Alex Glaros wrote:
It's like the desktop folder/directory model where you can create unlimited folders and put folders within other folders. Instead of folders, I want to use government organizations. Example: Let user create agency names: Air Force, Marines, Navy, Army. Then let them create an umbrella collection called "Pentagon", and let users drag Air Force, Marines, Navy, etc. into the umbrella collection. User may wish to add smaller sub-sets of Army, such as "Army Jeep Repair Services" User may also want to add a new collection "Office of the President" and put OMB and Pentagon under that as equals. What would the data model look like for this? If I have a field: next_higher_level_parent that lets children records keep track of parent record, it's hard for me to imagine anything but an inefficient bubble sort to produce a hierarchical organizational list. Am using Postgres, not graph database. I'm hoping someone else has worked on this problem, probably not with government agency names, but perhaps the same principle with other objects. Thanks! Alex Glaros
After struggling for years with a tree-like estate management system (onwer at the top, next level: real estate, banks, art collection, etc., third level: real estate units, bank accounts, etc. fourth level: investment positions, currency accounts, etc)--it recently occurred to me that I had such a system all along: the file system. The last folder at the bottom end of each branch names its contents (AAPL or USD or Lamborghini, etc) the contents is a csv file recording an in and out, revenue, expense history (date, quantity, paid or received, memo, . . .). Any documentation on the respective value item may also be stored in the same folder, easy to find without requiring cross referencing.
Managing the data is not a awkward as one might fear. A bash wizard could probably do it quite efficiently with bash scripts. Bash dummies, like me, are more comfortable with python. Moving, say, a portfolio from one bank to another is a matter of "mv i/banks/abc/account-123 i/banks/xyz" (system call). With the tabular data base system (MySQL) I have, simple operations like this one are quite awkward.
Well, you might laugh. Or others might. If your task is a commercial order, then this approach will hardly do. Anyway, I thought I'd toss it up. If it won't help it won't hurt.
Frederic -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
