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Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2000 17:13:35 +0000
To: Gareth Rees <gdr@ravenbrook.com>
From: Richard Brooksby <rb@ravenbrook.com>
Subject: Re: Automatic configuration design
Cc: p4dti-staff@ravenbrook.com
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At 2000-11-20 15:35 +0000, Gareth Rees wrote:

>	TITLE  	105 Title line 80 required	Line

What happens if  the TeamTrack TITLE field has more than 80 characters?

>    1. The Perforce field number is the next in sequence, starting at 106.

I suggest starting at a higher number, just in case Perforce add some 
more "system" fields.

>Entries with ? are field types that I'm not sure how to map (except 
>for SUMMATION they are all multiple selection fields).  It would be 
>straightforward to map the data using some scheme like making the 
>corresponding field a text field in Perforce and putting one entry 
>per line, but Perforce doesn't provide a multiple-selection 
>interface.  Some thought required here (we could replicate by 
>listing *all* the selection options one per line in a text field and 
>ticking the selected ones?)

I suggest that we don't support multiple selection fields, at least 
for the beta, and possibly never.  If we get requests to support 
them, then I suggest a comma-separated list, though we won't be able 
to validate it in the Perforce interface.

What happens when the configuration is changed to add new fields?  I 
suggest making the order of fields in the configuration significant, 
so that the field IDs in Perforce are derived from their positions. 
We can then warn people only to append fields if they don't want to 
lose their data.  I'm worried about the long term effects of this, 
though, as it doesn't give a way of removing fields.

The configuration function should generate the full configuration and 
the jobspec, and set the Perforce jobspec every time it runs.  We'll 
need to put a strong warning in for people who already have jobs in 
their systems.  The field comments in the jobspec should be generated 
from the field help in the TeamTrack database.

What happens when the type of a field changes?