[XESAM] Minutes of meeting 2007-05-15

[Evgeny Egorochkin]

On Friday 18 May 2007 15:34:25 Joe Shaw wrote:

> > It took my a sec to grok the distinction between hit type and file type.
> > If I understand correctly hit type could also be called "present as", and
> > yes present-as and file-type are independent the way you describe it.
> > However this is not the way I would abstract things. I think a category
> > tree like http://www.grillbar.org/xesam/object-graph.png would be
> > more natural. In this way both MailAttachment and files in a tarball are
> > both EmbeddedObjects in a natural way.
>
> I'm trying to merge this paragraph with the image URL you gave... does
> this mean that for each possible EmbeddedObject type, the entire
> Object hierarchy would be duplicated?  Ie:
>
> Object -> (Video, Audio, Person, etc.)
> EmbeddedObject -> MailAttachment -> (Video, Audio, Person, etc.)
> EmbeddedObject -> ArchivedFile -> (Video, Audio, Person, etc.)
>
> If so, I'm not crazy about this at all.  It feels a lot more natural
> to consider the concepts of what category the file is (file type) and
> where it comes from (hit type) as two independent pieces of
> information, and essentially treat them as interfaces implemented by a
> document.

Can you provide a more concrete example of why you can't e.g. define a 
Object.HitType field instead to provide the same functionality?

What benefits does this give?

What specific fields do different hit types have?

--Evgeny