Metadata support: EntitiesDescriptor/@Name handling

[Cantor, Scott]

On 8/16/13 2:23 PM, "Brent Putman" <putmanb at georgetown.edu> wrote:

>Ok, I don't think I was aware we were going to do that.  Mostly because
>in my head I was separating the concept of an "entity group" from the
>syntactic representation as EntitiesDescriptors.  The latter I knew was
>going away, but I assumed the former is still a useful abstraction and
>that we'd still preserve the notion of a named "entity group" one way or
>another.

We would, but I think your thought was that we would port those existing
mechanisms to rely on some other input, and I'm not sure that's practical,
*because* the likely alternative way to do groups is already represented
in the code by the EntityAttributes mechanism.

So essentially, if we wanted to keep the group stuff alive, we probably
would need to standardize a custom entity attribute to use. And that seems
kind of confusing/messy to me, and since there really is little or no use
of EntitiesDescriptor beyond very simple one-level cases, I'm not sure
it's worth turning them into EntityAttributes.

When I say "deprecate" I don't really mean the code, I mean the approach.


>Makes sense that the more general entity attribute-based ones could
>replace.  However, unfortunately we can't do if we use object metadata
>as Ian is (I think) advocating.  In that case I think we'd have to keep
>the *EntityGroup* functors around, but now they'd eval the object
>metadata rather than look at EntitiesDescriptors directly.

Yes. I mean that we would consider any use of those functors a red flag. A
SHOULD NOT if you will.

-- Scott