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See also, CH Project Notes
Planned Approach
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File Structure
The plan is to map resources to files in a file system and collections to directories. Simple enough until we try to associated properties and attachements.
Properties
Save properties in a file called file-name.properties, where file name corresponds to the base file name. Filter out all files that end in .properties from the list of resources contained in a collection.
Attachments
Save attachement references in a file called file-name.attachments. Filter out all files that end in .attachments from the list of resoources in a collection. Note that attachments will appear as resources in the collection. This may or may not be a good thing. If undesired, resources can be moved to a shadow context with collection structures replicated from the resources. This isn't a very good solution either, since the whole point of this exercise is to make it easier to retrieve files from back up. Moving them to a different point in the directory structure doesn't make this any easier for an administrator. An alternative approach is to put attachments into an archive (zip, for example).
Identifiers
Content resources are identified by a file name. In most cases, this name will have a file extention separated by a period, from which the MIME type may be deduced (via an extention map). All files also have a metadata file associated with it named the same, with a file extension of .properties. These properties may optionally be cached in a database to allow faster access to them.
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