Task System (preliminary work)

[AndMetal]

Originally Posted by Derision

I'm still undecided about how to implement the predecessor activity requirements. E.g. say a task has 10 activities and when you completed activity 1, activities 2 and 3 open up. Task 4 then won't open up until tasks 2 and 3 are complete.

As I see it, I can either put a limit on how many predecessors an activity can have (let's say 4), and then have four columns in the table, predecessor1, predecessor2, etc.

Or, have a text field which could contain a comma separated list of predecessors, e.g. "2,3". I dislike this because it means I have to parse the string to get at the predecessor info.

I'm leaning toward option 1 (a fixed, small number of predecessors and having a column for each).

Still lots left to do!

I think something like the "_entries" or "_metadata" tables currently in the database would work best, similar to what KLS recommended above. Here's an example:

CREATE TABLE TaskOrder (
	taskid int(11) unsigned NOT NULL,
	activityid int(11) unsgined NOT NULL,
	step int(11) unsigned NOT NULL,
	PRIMARY KEY(taskid, activityid)
)

"step" could be used to group each stage, so using your example, activity 1 would be step 1, activities 2 & 3 would be step 2, and activity 4 would be step 3:

taskid		activityid	step
1		1		1
1		2		2
1		3		2
1		4		3

That way, it's more dynamic, and doesn't create a large table if you want something more than 4 prerequisites deep.

Hope this gives you some ideas, the whole task system seems REAL promising