Design Question

[leblankenship]

I'm still getting myself to the point where I'm completely confident in my OOP design skills so I'm looking for some feedback on a couple of different ideas and the best approach.

I have an imaging app I'm working on for work with the following hierarchical structure:
A batch of documents gets scanned and stored in the database.
I want to have the scanned documents associated with the batch.

No problem, I have a batch and document table tied together in the database.

At first I tried doing a batch with a document collection but the performance stunk, so I switched to a batch document property which is essentially an object with seperate methods for loading, updating, deleting, and importing information into the list of documents. Since it's exposed to the outside world as a data table and works like a data table otherwise, I believe I can use it with a data repeater without difficulty and be able to manipulate it without difficulty and not run into the overhead of the collection approach. Any problems with this?

 

[ousoonerjoe]

Many years ago, I worked for a Doc Imaging Company. What we did was store the image (usually a TIFF) on the server and it's relative path in the database. Then when the user clicked <Next Item>, we would pull the file path and pass it over to the image control. Granted, this was back in the VB6 days, but worked really well. The only down time was associated with network speed and how fast the image could be pulled from the server to the client. It also kept our memory usage down so the users could do indexing and validating. If you're batching your documents, you'll need to do a "pre-processing" run to insert the file paths into the table with a BatchId. Then your users can pull up the batch by its respective Id.



--------------------------------------------------
“Crash programs fail because they are based on the theory that, with nine women pregnant, you can get a baby a month.” --Wernher von Braun
--------------------------------------------------