Property as Simple list of string values
I have a property, Emails, that needs to contain a list of comma-delimited values, or "". Is there a benefit to making this property a list of %String, a Collection[list] (or however you do it), an array, or anything other than a simple %String type?
I just need to store some values, and return these values in SQL -- so it needs to be SQL compatible. I don't need to index the values or use individual values in the SQL statement (e.g. Select * from table where emails [ "email@co.com" -- I don't need to do this, although maybe this would work anyway if it's of type %String).
What's the simplest way to store multiple string values, and display them in SQL? I'm just going with %String for now.
Thanks,
Laura
SIMPLEST? %String, definitely. You can even use the ['whatsup@doc.com' syntax to search if you have to. Using List of %String is a messy way to do anything in the relational world.
If you do need to index them later, I'm pretty sure you can use iFind to do this without too much trouble (although you would need a new license, potentially).
Well, that helps. Thanks. I can't forsee any reason to make it more complicated, unless there is some huge benefit that I'm overlooking? Ah, I was thinking of changing the emails to a list of users, and getting their emails from the user table, so maybe that's a future benefit.
I extended the %Net.MailMessage for one object, and had such a pain of a time stuffing the To prooperty and retrieving it again (it's a list of %String). This time I was thinking a simple %String would be nice, as long as I can use it with SQL, and stuff.
Thanks,
Laura
The benefits of using list of %String over just %String are:
I actually had a use case for exactly this data. Requirements were:
List of %String was extremely useful in this case. First I wrote a temp table:
Next I wrote a business service which searched for alerts and added them to this table (not relevant for this discussion). And then once all alerts for an hour are in the Util.Alert table, sendEmails method can easily send alerts in digest mode:
Without list of %String SQL here would be far harder to write or slower.