Property talk:Has documentType

Rename Suggestion

I wonder whether this wouldn't be better as the more general "has type". This fits the "few terms, many uses" approach - seems like less work, and I'm also thinking of the RDF's use by semantic reasoning engines, which should probably have sort of equivalent of "has type". Robin (talk) 03:48, 28 November 2013 (GMT)

Yes, I think so too. I had just used the same name as the corresponding template variable and hadn't considered its applicability to other kinds of documents - pdfs and others un-thought of. However, having thought about "Has publication date" a bit more, I think that would be best left as is - at least for now. Reason? - "Modification Date" refers to the date of any change to any document or file on the wiki itself; whereas "Has publication date" refers to the date of original publication of the document and has no connection to wiki creation or modification dates. We will then have system (wiki) date properties "Creation date", "Modification date" and "Has publication date" for a date that is unconnected to the wiki. I'll change the "DocType" property on the same basis as I was going to change the other because it is now assigned to over 500 pages and will put 500+ jobs in the queue --Peter P (talk) 07:12, 28 November 2013 (GMT)

More thoughts: Every property has a 'type' (default type='page'). So to have property named 'Has type' as well is potentially confusing. It would probably have been better to have named it 'Is document type', but, since 'DocProv' does the property assignment in the vast majority of cases, and the property is a property of each document, it is probably best to leave it as it is - for now anyway. --Peter P (talk) 10:16, 28 November 2013 (GMT)

Type String - v- Text

The 'Has Type String' is deprecated from SMW 1.8 (That's the version we currently run) and removed entirely for pending release 1.9. - See here. I think it will still work because 'string' is to be treated as an alias for 'text'. However, current usage differences will no longer exist from V 1.9.

SMW stores its MySQL data in 'Datastores' numbered with an incremented integer for releases requiring a schema changes. Old Datastores are retained and can continue in use with deprecated functionality (I think). We are currently running with the original datastore 1 because I hit an issue when upgrading to SMW 1.8 (can't remember exactly what it was now) and could only resolve it with a LocalSettings parameter specifying datastore 1 to be used.

With all that in mind, what is the thinking behind changing this property to type 'string' because we may well be forced to revert to type 'text' functionality in the future? --Peter P (talk) 09:20, 9 December 2013 (GMT)

I was working on the form and the DocType input was a textarea. This suggested to me that 'text' was intended for long wodges of text, so I changed it to 'string' and the default control switched to 'textbox'. If 'string' is deprecated, let's change back, but we may need to modify Form:Document. Robin (talk) 10:09, 9 December 2013 (GMT)