Ok, i'm in the middle of learning about all this XML goodness, and one of my current research projects is to design this shopping cart type app. Before I can start that, however, i'm looking at how to store the inventory in the database.
Now, what i've been thinking of doing is allowing users to define inventory item properties however they want, such that a "Book" has different properties from a "TShirt". I also want to be able to store all these object/items in the same table called "inventory".
My problem is if this is a worthwhile venture...i could save all these different types of objects as XML objects in a text field of the DB, but that would probably make searching through the properties of these XML items painful.
The alternative is to create a DB table based on the properties of the XML object after it is defined, but that could get nuts.
I have looked through the web for whitepapers and what-have-you on this kind of idea, but haven't found anything.
Is this a crazy idea? Is something like this being done somewhere?
