Re: object parenting?

["James K. Lowden" <jklowden schemamania org>]

On Mon, 09 Jun 2003 08:02:22 -0500, Lars Clausen <lrclause@cs.uiuc.edu>
wrote:
> On Mon, 09 Jun 2003, Vadim Berezniker wrote:
> > Will it be possible in the future (or maybe even now) to parent an
> > object?
> > 
> > That is creating objects that are not children of the diagram, but
> > children of another object.
>
> The Group "object" does that at the moment.  The reason I quote it is
> that it's not really a full-grown object, but more of a hack -- there
> are IIRC little special cases for it scattered around the code.  It also
> adds some problems with iterating over objects -- e.g. should 'Select
> Same Type' select objects inside other objects?

IMHO the simplest and most general solution for this is for objects to
support URLs or the XML equivalent.  That way, diagrams and objects don't
need to gain a new dimension, but a database/network/whatever can be
represented by a collection of diagrams.  The URL needn't point to a dia
diagram, either; it could be documentation or source material for the
object.  (Keep in mind the URL might be "file://...").  

I don't know how to do it, but I hope that one day there will be a Mozilla
plugin version of Dia, something that will let Dia diagrams become
ubiquitous on the web.  That would be a big step forward from passing
around PDF files, and would have a much higher information/bandwith ratio
than Flash.  

--jkl