DynamicTypes

What are dynamic types?

Different types of objects have different types of attributes: Notebooks, rooms and vehicles all have their own characeristics; lectures have attributes different from meetings or conferences. You can easily customize Rapla for your domain by creating or modifying resource-, person- and event-types.

If you manage rooms, you can create a resource-type "room" and add attributes like "number of seats", "department" or "has blackboard".

Or if you manage courses create an event type "lecture" with the attributes "year" and "study course".

These types are called "dynamic types" because you can create and change attributes on a running Rapla system.

Example: Creating a resource-type "room"

Right click on the "resources" node in the left tree, select and click "new resource-type" and enter "room" in the 'typename' text field.

Now, add a new attribute with the name "number of seats" and type "integer" and save to create the resource-type. To create new rooms, right-click and choose new "room" in the menu. You can now enter the "name" of the room and the "number of seats"

Adding a category-attribute to the resource-type "room"

We now want to assign the rooms to the departments they belong to. We do this by adding an attribute of type "category". But before that, we need to enter our department categories in the [category-view|Categories]. Create a new category with the name "departments" and add three sub-categories "Department A", "Department B" and "Department C".

Save the categories and go back and edit the resource-type "room". Add a third attribute with the name "department" and the type "category" and click on the "root" button. Now you can select the category that should be used as the root for this attribute. The sub-categories of the selected root represent all valid values for the attribute.

Choose "departments" as root and save the modified resource-type. Try to add a new room, you should be able to select a department for the room.

Using attributes for filtering

The attributes of a dynamic type have mainly informational purpose but also can be used for [wiki:Filter filtering]:

Show me only the rooms in department A on the first floor.

or

Show me the foundation lectures and courses of the department of computer-science.