NMPDR Development Blog

Attributes now has its own category on the development blog.

The Even Newer Attribute System is now operating on the SEED instance running on the Development Server. It has been tested to make sure all the little bits work, and will be moved to the attribute server and integrated into the annotator SEED next month. In the meantime, you can see the attribute console at http://web-1.nmpdr.org/next/FIG/Attributes.cgi.

The most important change that still needs to be made is getting the select.cgi collections converted. This is a self-inflicted wound, because I wanted the subsystem attributes to be attached to the actual subsystems instead of a thing called "Subsystem". In order to do that, I need to make changes to select.cgi.

The Even Newer Attribute System differs from the New Attribute System in several ways. There is now a single table of attributes implemented as a relationship between TargetObjects and AttributeKeys. Target objects are identified by ID only, rather than ID and type, which makes the system more like the Old Attribute System.

The TargetObject entity is virtual, which means that there is no data in the TargetObject table. There is, however, another entity called AttributeGroup that allows arbitrary grouping of attribute keys. There is only one level of grouping, but an attribute can belong to many different groups.

The AttrDBRefresh script is used to do batch attribute processing. It has options for backing up attributes to a tab-delimited file, loading attributes from a tab-delimited file, and migrating attributes from an instance of the SEED.

The attribute backup and load files are expected to contain an object ID, an attribute key name, and one or more values in each line. There is also a facility for uploading a single attribute from the web. In this case, the file must still be tab-delimited, but you specify the columns containing the object ID and the attribute value in the upload form.