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From: roskill@cs.umass.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hypercard
Subject: Re: Designing a database
Message-ID: <10980@dime.cs.umass.edu>
Date: 5 Mar 90 18:47:15 GMT
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Distribution: usa
Organization: COINS, UMass, Amherst
Lines: 49

Obviously I have a few things to clarify about my database design
project. B-]

In article <39106@apple.Apple.COM>, chuq@Apple.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) writes...

>Are they text-only documents? How large? 15 pages can be as much as about
>70,000 characters, which would be difficult to impossible to wedge into a
>single field. Do the documents need to be searchable inside the document?

The document are not text-only.  They have to be able to have the normal
Mac typefacing commands (i.e. bold/underline/etc.).  The size of the
document could be 90,000+ or less.  It would be nice if the documents
were searchable.

>A better approach would be (unless the text needs to be searchable) to keep
>the document separate and keep it in some well-known place maintained by the
>stack. See the technotes stack as one example. If the documents are non-text
>(word or whatever) this'll be pretty much a necessity. Some databases have a
>concept of a 'blob' datatype, which is basically a binary piece of stuff the
>database keeps and doesn't muck with.

Ok...so let's say that I can run Hypercard and MS Word at the same time,
and I want it to function like this:  for each card, there is an associated
file.  If the user click on a button (that says something like "Go to Text"),
is it possible to force MS Word (4.0) to open that document and switch to
MS Word?

>This sounds like a couple of databases I've been playing with -- they're
>complex enough that I think putting them in a real database is justified,
>rather than using an environment like HC and constantly bumping into the
>edges. I'd rather start in an environment is a little too powerful for what
>I"m doing and expect to grow into it than start with something that's not
>quite powerful enough and hack it to fit, because you end up spending most
>of your time fighting it to make it work.
> 

I agree that Hypercard is not powerful enough to do this and grow.  But
does anyone know of another solution (i.e. another database program that
can do this kind of stuff)?

I also wanted to thank everyone again for helping me out with this.

Damian Roskill

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| Damian Roskill                  |                              |
| Roskill@cs.umass.edu            |                              |
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