Design Approach

HCL Domino Domino Forum
1

We are designing a employee database.We want to build a position hierarchy to use to build our reporting structure in our company.

We have designed Employee Profile Documents to track employee specific information.

We have also designed Position Profile documents to assign available employees to. these profiles can be of Exec, Director, Supervisor, or employee type positions.

We want our reporting hierarchy to reflect the position hierarchy.

What do you think the best approach would be to build this hierarchy? Should we use the document/response/response to response methodology. Or should be take a relationl database approach and build key fields on the respective forms to tie forms together?

Here is the proposed structure.

Company

|__Executive Position Profile

  |__Director Position Profile

       |__Supervisor Position Profile

            |__Employee Position Profile

Rules:

  1. All profiles can be created off of a Exec profile.

  2. Supervisor and Employee can be created off of the Director Profile.

  3. Employee can only be created off of a Supervisor profile

I would like to open this up for discussion to get some feedback on different approaches and possible positive and negatives to each approach.

Thanks for your envolvement

2

Subject: Some tradeoffs

Ultimately, you’ll probably need to use both/and/all, and maybe even a little more.

Response hierarchy’s good as far as it goes, but I’d say make sure you have the IDs available to look up documents by their reference IDs. Often you’ll want to use @DbLookup to find the documents, even if you don’t display the documents that way.

Response hierarchies won’t let you display a whole lotta data in the response documents, while they’re in a view. In some cases you’ll also need to resort to categorized hierarchies to get more of the information you want, formatted the way you want.

Obviously, Notes is not relational, so building the joins and reports that you might need to get nice pictures on paper, there’s not a good, solid, single, direct answer to that problem in Notes at the moment.

'Hope it helps.