Cannot put all data search in database

Issue Sensor Data

The issue sensor data now is decided to use single instance per issue design. The owner of the sensordata, which is the major problem of the approach, is set by the issue sensor, before we can come up something better to decide the data owner. We just want to move on to the core part instead of sitting there thinking about the data owner. That is the easiest way, but require most attention of users to ensure things work good, so sufficient documentation may compensate somehow, hopefully.

New API to SensorBase

When coding the issue sensor as single instance per issue, it is important to get the data of the given issue efficiently. While the issue is identified by its id (number id usually), and that id is stored as a property in the sensordata, it will be nice to extend SensorBase's API to return sensordata which contains a given property with given value. So I start to try to do this. Unfortunely, I found it is not easy to accomplish, and should not be include to SensorBase's functionality.

Firstly I study about the mechanism of its API. I thought the API will look like http://hostname:port/sensorbase/sensordata/user/timestamp/?sdt=sensordatatype&propertyname=propertyvalue. It is actually possible to use dynamic property name, by using "{propertyname}={propertyvalue}" in route definition. Then in the resource, just get the property name and property value as two Strings, just the same way as usual property.

Secondly I try to extend the database interface to allow query sensordata with given property entry, when I found the current tables in database does not support this query. In the sensordata table, the values are (Owner, Tstamp, Sdt, Runtime TIMESTAMP, Tool, Resource, XmlSensorData, XmlSensorDataRef, LastMod), and the property list in stored in the XmlSensorData, which is a XML representation of the sensordata. In order to get the data, I need to query the XmlSensorData. However, in order to get a set of XmlSensorData, I need to first get their XmlSensorDataRef, then use that to query the XmlSensorData(It is not the only way to doing this, but it is the convention of SensorBase, probably to make it easier to separate data instances from query return.). When I get the XML data, I parse the XML and extract the property list, then do the comparison. Then this API query will return the XmlSensorDataRef. The user actually need to retrieve the data with the data reference again from SensorBase. As you can see, there are duplicate query from reference to data instance. That's because the SensorBase is trying to do the things that suppose to be done by data user. The most reasonable way is, the user get the data from the data references, then do the comparison to get the data he want by himself.

Therefore, the issue sensor will just get all the issue data(with the sensordatatype = issue), then compare the issue id to get the one it need to add data in.