[Zope] Need Zen advice, how to organize invoice items which I'm considering making folderish

[Andy McKay]

> Now comes the moment where I get confused by the choices: This process
> will generate 50,000+ invoices per year. Nobody wants a to browse a
> folder with 50,000 entries. Can I reasonably use transparent folders to
> group all those invoices by day, week, month, and so on into a tree
> heirarchy? No doubt it could be done, but should I?

Probably not, but I wouldn't want to browse a SQL database of 50,000+
entries either. The structure sounds fine, the problem is the presentation
method. Take the records and use ZCatalog to do the presentation.

> Would the invoices still be 'as one collection' (thanks to the
> transparency of their grouping folders) if I wanted to write python
> scripts joining Zcatalog results that took the place of my current sql
> queries? Sometimes you're thinking of the invoices as grouped by dates,
> other times you're looking for the aggregate of other properties, such
> as CustomerID. I need to be able to create things like "show all year
> 2001 invoices for customers in the 90210 zip code" as well as, "Show the
> average invoice amount for the the top 10 customers."

Ugh, this might be a killer because that sort of thing can be hard to do in
ZCatalog, check that you can do all the queries you want before you go down
that path.
--
  Andy McKay