Re[2]: [lmi] Historical product files

[Vadim Zeitlin]

On Thu, 20 May 2010 19:35:19 +0200 Vaclav Slavik <address@hidden> wrote:

VS> On Wed, 2010-05-19 at 16:55 +0000, Greg Chicares wrote:
VS> > Of course, we could use xml comments to suppress everything that isn't
VS> > current, but then we'd have to alter the format later to make such data
VS> > accessible again.
VS> > 
VS> > Is there any radically-different good idea that I've overlooked?
VS> 
VS> None that I could think of.

 Me neither unfortunately (I say this because I don't especially like this
proposal but part of the problem is that I don't even know what precisely
is bad about it). I did think about a slight variation on the same theme:
what about using a different tag name for historical stuff? E.g. have
something like this:

        <historical_item EffectiveDate="20020101">...</historical_item>
        <historical_item EffectiveDate="20020201">...</historical_item>
        <item EffectiveDate="2010-05-20">...</item>

? The obvious advantage is that you don't have to change anything in the
existing code because there would still be just a single "item". One
disadvantage is loss of some consistency but OTOH don't we actually want to
treat the last item specially?

 Another, potentially more serious, disadvantage is that files will need to
be edited (although only slightly, but still) and not just appended to when
a new set of data is added. I don't know how big a problem would this be in
practice.

 Regards,
VZ