Resources and paths

Resource types and paths

In CATGLOBE there are many types of resources and each of them has the option of being the child of another resource. Some of the most notable resource types are:

• Projects
• Folders
• Tasks
• Questionnaires
• Reports
• Attachments
• Images
• Users
• Groups

When we talk of this child / parent relationship we often talk of the path to a resource. A typical path would look something like below.

//System/Folder of Projects in 2003/Project for Nestle/Task: Send Invoice/Scanned Image of Invoice

The “paths” do not always in themselves reveal what types of resources that the parents or parents of parents are – but e.g. in the above we can guess it from the name. There is in the above an image attached to a task. The task is part of the project “Nestle”. This project resides in the folder “Folder of Projects in 2003”. The folder is linked to a resource called “System”. System will always be the lowest level of a path (the root), since this is the resource where resources that are seen as primary entrances to other resources will be attached. You could compare it with the meaning of the “hard drive” or “C:” drive in Windows. All other applications and information are somehow children of the hard drive.

Many of the resources have some shared extensions that can be used in relation to all the resources. Other resources are by system default limited, since the developers do not expect it to be used by our clients. An example is images. Images can be related to many other resources, but there are no resources that can be related to Images. It would rarely make sense to have e.g. a report as a child of an image.

Another interesting case is that the path system is hierarchical and thus only specifies the location of the resources in the file system of Catglobe and not the relationship between all resources. You may have thought that a user was a child resource of a group, but it is not so. Users can be member of many groups and restricting them to belong to one group through the hierarchy of resources would not make sense.

Some resources are very limited in regards to the parents they can belong to. For example user resources will always be children of the system resource. Other resource types have almost endless setup options. It is not impossible in CATGLOBE to have a project that is a child of a folder that again is a child of another project.

Common for all resource names is that they must be at least 1 and at most 155 characters long and not contain a back-slash.