Hey,

Perhaps it would be a viable compromize to drop the "prefix+number" assumption
for entity IDs in general, but keep it for the kinds of entities we have right now.

We need to decide if we want to support ids that have another format or not. This is a boolean thing, as you cannot "sort of support it" and expect that to lead to good design. The main goal of this threat is getting an answer to that question.

This would mean that there would be a base class and/or interface called
something like NumericEntityId, which at least ItemID and PropertyId would
derive from resp. implement. That interface would then be required by storage
services that rely on the table structure described by Jeroen.

This does not solve the issue. As these interfaces would only accept NumericEntityId, callers would need to make sure they only provide such ids. How are they going to do this? I do not see how this could be done nicely in our codebase. And what happen when we have an entity id type that does not implement this? We'd need to go tackle all these assumptions to have it integrate nicely. We'd need to do all the work we need to do now, plus fixing all new occurrences of these assumptions if we go ahead pretending we can use them without this further undermining entity id flexibility. So the approach proposed here is practically the same as stating "we will not support other formats", except that it lies about this intend, and causes _more_ work we'd need to do in case we decide the decision was wrong and we need to support them anyway.

Cheers

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Jeroen De Dauw
http://www.bn2vs.com
Don't panic. Don't be evil. ~=[,,_,,]:3
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