Quote:
Originally Posted by kbs666
What you're talking about in database speak is many to many relationships. Databases don't tend to handle many to many relationships well at all. I'm not saying it can't be done just that there is quite likely a performance price to be paid for doing so.
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Right now they are storing the links between items somehow - because you can literally pull up a view of every link the item has to it within snippets. This is actually kind of a cool view btw.
The only difference here is they would need to create a new type of database object that holds a specific type of snippet that says 'if I exist then render me as the parent object' (yes this isn't trivial as it sounds - I'm not ignorant of that fact).
The 'shortcut' topic would be an actual node with a single generated snippet type with some kind of key to generate the callback to the topic - short sweet and works just like everything else in the database (the actual topic can even get it's own auto-generated random name that we never see) - the real work would be in the render engine when finding *that* kind of snippet/topic rendering the referenced topic.
No relationship issues would exist that don't already based on how they are doing things.