We bought a third party survey tool - ClassApps SelectSurvey - which is to be shared among at least ten of our company's applications. In our apps we would like to link directly to a given survey rather than having the user have to hit the survey sign on screen, and select from a huge list of surveys. Question is, given that a survey has metadata like user, organization, reporting period, etc., where should the metadata be stored? As metadata in the SelectSurvey database, or should we have associative tables in each of the other ten applications which contain survey ids?
+2
A:
Saving the metadata in one place might give you more control and view over who (which app) is using what survey.
If you place the metadata inside SelectSurvey's DB - it will be a custom table, and your apps will need to be aware of this table. Otherwise you will have to ensure that each of your 10 apps has a consistent version of the meta-data table-structure in them.
So I'd lean towards keeping the meta-data closer to the survey's data store.
blispr
2009-11-19 19:07:35