Best of Both Worlds, Twice - I think this was the missing element to a perfect system: The "one db, one tree" nexus is dead.

Posted by Pierre Paul Landry
Jan 28, 2014 at 05:35 PM

22111,

Continuing a discussion from here:
http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=35633.msg347854#msg347854
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>- Could we have a (short, schematized, but nethertheless) real-life example of where recursion in IM would really be useful?

In IQ, hierarchy is something that is added to items. It is sometimes shown, sometimes not. Closer to a hyperlink than to a disk folder structure.

Items exist in the database, like you and me exist on this earth. If a parent is deleted, its sub-items are not necessarily deleted. Same for you and me… if your father dies, you don’t automatically die with him.

So items exist in the database. At any moment, you may want to show an item as a new child of another item. For whatever reason. Why prevent this for the sole reason that somewhere up the hierarchy chain, that item is also present ?

Another example is any good old web page. It may link to sub-pages, and these will typically link back to the main page. A nice convenience and something we don’t even think about. The same can be done in IQ.

So, there are at least 2 cases where this is desirable: (1) The hierarchy is deep and (2) To bring a parent close to an item.

Regarding sloppy IM and programming, I believe that IM software should not constrain users.
If recursion is supported, it is certainly not because of laziness, but as a feature. Example of this: IQ support hierarchy equations (i.e. such as value=SUM(children)) and inheritance. Both of these require that recursion be handled correctly to ensure that one does not get into infinite loops !

HTH !