Re: [Gnumed-devel] re: create user UI plugin

[Karsten Hilbert]

On Thu, Jan 19, 2006 at 07:22:04PM -0800, Jim Busser wrote:

> >Nope, sign is intended for a short "call-sign" thingy, eg
> >"Leonard McCoy" has "LMcC". This is used where we need a short
> >signum for the provider. Please suggest a better term, anyone.

> short_name
> user_initials
> unique_initials
It need not be either of name or initials but can be
completely arbitrary.

> short_form
Of what ?

What about "short_alias" ?

> So far, I have not seen in the schema wiki-like spellings for field 
> names, for example shortName or uniqueInitials.
Such are called CamelCase (two humps, visually). The
motivation for using this or either of other conventions
(underscores, hyphens, even whitespace where possible) is to
increase readability yet keep the name parts close together.
CamelCase is not a viable option for a database that obeys
the SQL specs because the specs say that identifiers are to
be case INSENSITIVE (folding to lowercase in the case of
PostgreSQL). The choice of _ over - is because _ doesn't
usually have an operational meaning in the context of x_y.
x-y would mean subtraction in pretty much any decent
language (or range(x, y)).

> So probably best to 
> not start using them mid-process, even if postgres would tolerate 
> them?
I would tolerate them and even "obey" case sensitivity - but
only if identifiers are double-quoted.

If we stick to not relying on case sensitivity and never
quote we avoid a common source of bugs.

Karsten
-- 
GPG key ID E4071346 @ wwwkeys.pgp.net
E167 67FD A291 2BEA 73BD  4537 78B9 A9F9 E407 1346