Well, folks, today I dug in and banged out a task I've been mulling over and putting off for more than a month. I rewrote the widget for linking figures to packages in such a way that it no longer does a search using the terms in the package title. Instead, now you just pick the figures one at a time using a regualr figure selection widget. Listen, it's not as boring as it sounds--I worked all day on this, people!
The long and short of it is that a) you'll no longer have to wade through scores of listings when linking a figure, and b) it's no longer necessary to spell out the name of each figure contained in a package in the package's title. This brings up an interesting issue; should the package title contain the name of all the linked in figures anyway? If they do, you'll still get package matches when searching for a figure name. For example, if you search for Cheetor within the Botcon category, you get a match for the "Dawn of Future's Past" package:
http://www.shmax.com/results/412?searchTerm=cheetorI dunno. Maybe what I'll do is compound the search, such that linked figure names are checked when searching packages.
It sounds like another day of head-scratching, but something tells me this is sort of key to making the DB fundamentally groovy. Any thoughts, guys?
- shmax
