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Posted by Scott Marquardt on 10/18/81 11:27
What are some good strategic approaches to using freeform text fields for
data that needs to be queried? We have a product whose tables we can't
change, and I need to count on a "description" field for storing a value.
Two, actually. I'm thinking of adopting this convention:
InvoiceNumber@VendorAcronym
There'd be a lot of vendors.
Additional issue: sometimes these values would be referred to in the
description field, and I'd need to distinguish them as referrals rather
than as original recorded instances of the values. For that, I imagined
either:
InvoiceNumber@@VendorAcronym
or
InvoiceNumber&VendorAcronym
InvoiceNumber//VendorAcronym
etc. -- something like that.
I'm just wondering if there's best practice for doing anything this stupid
(hey, I'm stuck with this as our only option just now; hopefully it's only
temporary). How to parse out whatever I end up implementing -- well, it
needs to be tractable.
Thoughts?
--
Scott
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