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Descriptive and short names

Build 1501 on 14/Nov/2017 This topic last edited on: 21/Mar/2016, at 18:33

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Descriptive name

Each object has a descriptive name that is used in the user interfaces to identify the object. This descriptive name is computed according to rules that are part of the object type definition.

In most cases the descriptive name will be just the value of an attribute (e.g. a name or description attribute), but in some cases it could be something more complex, e.g. if there is an ‘edition’ object type identified by a date and a city the descriptive name could be the date formatted in a specific way appended to the city, so for the Milan edition of May 3rd, 2006 the descriptive name would be ‘Milan – Wednesday May 3rd, 2006’.

Short name

Each object can have also a (separate) ‘short name’ – that still identifies the object but in a shorter form. Following the example above the short name of an edition could be just the date – and it will be used in the user interface where the city is already specified, for example in a list of editions divided by city.

The short name is optional – it defaults to the full descriptive name.

The formula to compute the descriptive and short names are XPath expressions, following the same rules as in the case of the computed attributes.

Note that the descriptive and the short names are NOT attributes, so their value is not stored in the database, but computed as needed by the software.