Over the past few days (in my spare time in the evenings) I've been trying
to think of a table design that would best lend itself to paging the content
for the purpose of paging articles on a website. You might say this is an
exercise in putting lesser-known theory into practice.
Here are the basic business requirements in no particular order:
1. The website will be geared towards providing (and paging) technical
content (technical articles)
2. I would like to be able to add the articles, as a whole, to the database.
I'd also like to edit them as a single piece of work. Not by page(s).
Managing the content would be done via an HTML wysiwyg editor (think
FreeTextBox or FCKEditor).
3. I'll be building this with SQL Server 2000 and ASP.NET (C# and/or
VB.NET..I know both languages equally as well)
4. For each web request, I would like to only retrieve the article data that
is needed to display the current page, not the entire article's content.
This is because some articles could span 10 or more pages and I need the
requests to execute in a timely manner (I know there are ASP.NET caching
considerations, too).
5. I would like to be able to dynamically (via configuration-type setting)
specify what I consider to be the size of a logical "page"...I haven't
decided yet if this should be in paragraphs, words, or another unit of
textual measurement.
6. I'm open to any kind of data storage idea. Maybe storing references in
the database to XML documents would work best? Or maybe storing that XML in
the database and returning XML page fragments?
I realize this might require a bit of programming effort to achieve but I
want to get this right up front so I can use it in years to come.
I appreciate any ideas you'd like to share.
-Jason
