redirectTo: how far to go with it ?
October 20th, 2004 at 1:10 pm (3 years, 10 months ago) by Andi Vajda under chandlerdb‘redirectTo’ is an attribute aspect that redirects all value and other aspect accesses on an attribute to another one.
The redirection can be chained recursively and the attribute redirected to can be on the same item or on another item using a dot-separated attribute name path where each intermediate name is a reference to an item. This very general definition, while being powerful, makes certain things very hard. For example, tracking value changes in an attribute becomes much more difficult if the actual attribute containing the value of interest is changing as well. While redirectTo seemed a good idea at first, the direction Chandler is taking it is pointing at tensions in its data model that would probably be better solved in other ways. The current thinking is to move away from redirectTo or to make it at least not as generous.
