[development] node types should not be changeable, operations need hooks

[Neil Drumm]

Jeremy Epstein wrote:
> On 8/24/06, Neil Drumm <drumm at delocalizedham.com> wrote:
>> Database: databases like numeric keys. I think it would be good to
>> replace the machine-readable type there with numbers.
>>
>> PHP code: since there is no exposed UI here (always use the [human
>> readable] type name), I think the same numbers might work. This is a bit
>> harder with hard-coded node types, since they have a hard-coded name
>> that is used. Perhaps the hard-coded name can be recalled and used for
>> hook invocation where applicable.
> 
> Hard-coded node types is the main reason why we didn't introduce
> numeric node type IDs into the pre-CCK patch. A numeric node type ID
> is of little value, when you still have to match database node types
> with hard-coded node types, based on the original machine-readable
> name.
> 
> However, I can see that numeric node type IDs (for which, btw, I would
> suggest 'ntid' as a DB field name) would indeed make life much easier,
> in terms of foreign key references to node types in the database (e.g.
> the 'type' field in the 'node', 'vocabulary_node_types', and other
> tables). We should definitely investigate bringing them in, despite
> the fact that we'll still have to keep 'orig_type', and use that for
> linking back to hard-coded module-defined types.
> 
> On 8/24/06, Darrel O'Pry <dopry at thing.net> wrote:
>> Why not use a sanitized human readable name in places like css and html
>> output?  What we're really talking about is user morphable database
>> keys, which in my opinion is out right wrong. We don't give end users
>> access to change nids? or any other ids do we?
> 
> Darrel is right, using non-permanent fields as database keys is
> suicide. It's only a matter of time before that causes problems. So
> yeah, let's keep allowing users to change the machine-readable type
> name, let's keep using 'orig_type' so that DB node types can reference
> their hard-coded equivalents, and let's introduce non-changeable
> numeric IDs for node types, to be used as reliable primary keys.

Sounds great. +1

-- 
Neil Drumm
http://delocalizedham.com/