BluePrint: Record Merger

Introduction

There are several occasions where records need to be merged manually, e.g.:

• De-duplication
• Synchronization conflict resolution

Description

The idea is to implement a generic merge method for the RESTful API, which responds to URLs like:

/xxx/yyyyyy/25/merge?with=27

• merge record 27 (=merge source) into record 25 (=original record)

Additionally, the low-level API could also accept a Storage of fields from the caller instead of another record.

Requirements

• GET merge returns a form like above:
  • the merge form behaves basically like a normal update form:
    • the user can edit the original record
    • the user can click on <<copy to copy values from the merge source

• POST merge does:
  • update the original record with the data of the form
  • update all links to the merge source into links to the original record
  • mark the merge source deleted (or delete it, if no deletion status)
  • audit update

• PUT merge does:
  • respond with "invalid method" (HTTP/405)

• DELETE merge does:
  • respond with "invalid method" (HTTP/405)

• Errors:
  • original record does not exist => HTTP/404 Not Found
  • merge source does not exist => HTTP/404 Not Found (or redirect to update?)

Use-Cases

• Primary actor:
  • admin user / editor user

• Merging of duplicate records in the de-duplicator
• Merging of conflicting remote records in the synchronization conflict resolution UI

Design

• Implement merge as a method in S3Resource, which:
  • generates the merge form from either another record in the same resource or a Storage of fields
  • processes the form upon POST
• Implement merge as a method in S3CRUDHandler, which:
  • parses the URL query variable with
  • calls the S3Resource.merge method appropriately

Implementation

• not yet implemented, scheduled for S3XRC 2.3

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BluePrints