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PODynamic contact information data/design pattern: Is this in any way feasible?
 

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  1. PODynamic contact information data/design pattern: Is this in any way feasible?
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    <p>I'm currently working on a web business application that has many entities (people,organizations) with lots of contact information ie. multiple postal addresses, email addresses, phone numbers etc. </p> <p>At the moment the database schema is such that persons table has postal address columns, phone number columns as does organizations table. This is not a good way to handle this.</p> <p>I've read the c2 Wiki on this and there's some good discussion regarding <a href="http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?ContactAndAddressModels" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Contact and address models (<a href="http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?ContactAndAddressModels" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?ContactAndAddressModels</a>)</a> and wheter or not <a href="http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?ArePhysicalPostalAddressesArchaic" rel="nofollow noreferrer">physical addresses are archaic (<a href="http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?ArePhysicalPostalAddressesArchaic" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?ArePhysicalPostalAddressesArchaic</a>)</a>. These two discussions really opened my eyes on the scope of this problem.</p> <p>I'm thinking about separating <b>contact information fields to separate table(s)</b>. But what's the best way to do this. At the moment the application mainly handles Finnish addresses but it's on the horizon that it needs also to handle international addresses. </p> <p>I could define an "addresses" -table, a "phone numbers" -table, an "email addresses" -table and so on and these would be linked to people and organizations. But this just feels too much like the previous solution: it's inevitable that the predefined database schema isn't sufficient.</p> <p>What I'm proposing is to create a contact information schema/program logic that is <b>dynamic</b>:</p> <ul> <li>There are no predefined contact information fields/field sets</li> <li>Users can define new contact information types and required fields at any time like <ul> <li>Finnish postal address</li> <li>Swedish postal address</li> <li>... postal address</li> <li>Phone number</li> <li>Email address</li> <li>ICQ-number</li> </ul> </li> </ul> <p><b>Is this feasible?</b> Has anyone done anything like this? </p> <p>There could be a table that defines contact information types:</p> <h3>contact information types</h3> <ul> <li>Id: Identifier</li> <li>Name: "Finnish postal address"</li> <li>Description: "Use this contact information type for finnish postal addresses"</li> </ul> <p><br/> Then there could be a table that defines what fields are used per contact information type:</p> <h3>contact information type fields</h3> <ul> <li>Id: Identifier</li> <li>Contact_information_type_id: References the previous table</li> <li>Field title: "Address line 1"</li> <li>Field description: "Use this line for postal addresses' first line"</li> <li>Field type: String/Integer/etc.</li> <li>Field format: Regular expression for validating field data</li> <li>Field order: In which order should this field appear when displaying/using this contact information type</li> </ul> <p><br/> Then we'd have a "contact information table" that just is used to map contact information fields together:</p> <h3>contact information</h3> <p><ul> <li>Id: Identifier</li> <li>Contact_information_type_id: References the contact information type table</li> </ul></p> <p><br/> Then we'd have a "contact information of person" -table mapping different contact information to persons:</p> <h3>contact information of person</h3> <ul> <li>Id: Identifier</li> <li>Contact_information_id: References the contact information table</li> <li>Person id: References the person</li> </ul> <p><br/> Then we'd need tables per contact information field type like:</p> <h3>contact information integer fields</h3> <p><li>Id: Identifier</li> <li>Contact_information_id: References the contact information table</li> <li>Value: The value of this field</li> <br/></p> <p>and so on for strings etc...</p> <p>Finally when displaying different contact information of a given person this would happen through <b>person's contact information</b> -table whis looks up what fields are used to form this contact information from <b>contact information type fields</b> -table through <b>contact information</b> -table. After determining what fields are used all the necessary tables would be joined together.</p> <p>I'm having doubts about the feasibility of in SQL. Any thoughts?</p> <p>In Java I probably could program some logic to determine what tables are neede to form a contact information entity and then i could use some sort of dynamic beans to represent this data in Java. But that's a bit foggy to me too. Anyt thoughts on this too?</p>
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    1. USDaniel Daranas
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      1. PODynamic contact information data/design pattern: Is this in any way feasible?
      1. USMahmoud Abdelkader
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