[ckan-dev] FIxing the DataStore vs FileStore duality confusion

Thu Mar 14 13:06:03 UTC 2013

This is great! thanks Sean.

>   I've since convinced myself that this is a bad idea because it's too
>   confusing from the user's point of view (see questions below the
>   suggestion on the wiki page)
>
> - "Alternative Suggestion: FileStore and DataStore as one resource type"
>   is an alternative idea that might be much less work to implement and
>   may cover everything while also being simpler from the user's point of
>   view, I've just written this but no one has looked at/criticised it
>   yet.

I am very strongly in favour of this Alternative Suggestion.

By the way, I admit my user stories covered functionality beyond the
basic datastore/filestore - I included them because I think they all
nevertheless bear on what kind of behaviour users will expect from
CKAN's storage, and in all cases, this is that the user just wants to
know 'Have you got the data or not?' not 'Have you got it in your pink
folder? How about your purple folder?' So I agree that the 'suggested
behaviour' is far too complicated and confusing (and so is the current
behaviour).

I think Sean's 'alternative suggestion' really well combines meeting
user expectations of comprehensibility with providing all the
functions people want and giving people control over their data.

One comment: I appreciate that datastore versioning, nice though it
might be, is a long way off. But how feasible is it to at least keep a
list of edit time + user for each (editable) datastore resource? I
think edited data with no paper trail at all would make most people
too nervous to use the possibilities created by updating via
datastore.

Mark