You are viewing an old version of this page. View the current version.
Compare with Current
View Page History
« Previous
Version 5
Next »
Store information physically only by properties that are invariant.
Each time a new document is to be created, a location to store it is required. Finding the right location may be cumbersome for the author. Finding the document by browsing may be difficult for the reader who demands the information.
How should documents be organized physically?
Structure
If you store a document by properties that may change in the future then not only the document has to be changed, but also the location the document is stored. This should never be the case since changing the location may call for a large amount of work.
Ideally the users of a document are not concerned with the physical location of a document. The may drop the information in any location knowing that there are a lot of views that support readers to find the content by its categories.
Advantages
- If the physical location is determined by invariant information of the document, the document will never needed to be relocated.
- If the physical location is something an author does not need to bother about, resources are free to invest in delivering information.
Disadvantages
- Additional views are required to organize the content for different audiences. But a physical location will nevertheless only support one view for one audience.
- An invariant information may be hard to determine. The type of the document is typically something that will rarely change.
Resources
For more information regarding this practice please refer to: