[Developers] South Carolina weirdness

[Jason Douglas]

The problem is that from an app development perspective, the  
distinction between frequent and rare is pretty meaningless.  Always  
and never are much easier to code to.  :-)


On Jun 4, 2008, at 12:17 PM, Kurt Bollacker wrote:

>
> On Wed, Jun 04, 2008 at 10:51:01AM -0700, Arthur van Hoff wrote:
>> Hi Will,
>>
>> I've seen this happen in our code several times. Although the schema
>> allows you to specify properties to have unique values, there does  
>> not
>> appear to be strict enforcement of this rule.
>
> It is strict in the sense of creation.  i.e. No multiples of unique
> properties can be written once the property becomes unique.
>
>> It is very annoying to write all queries assuming that any property
>> (even when it is marked unique) can return multiple values.  
>> However, if
>> you don't do this your code is fragile, and will trip up easily in  
>> case
>> of a bad insert. I wish there was a better solution.
>
> For types in the main hierarchy, this problem should be very rare.
> For user/private types, the problem depends on the creator of the
> type.
>
>> Have fun,
>>
>>    Arthur van Hoff
>>
>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: developers-bounces at freebase.com [mailto:developers-
>>> bounces at freebase.com] On Behalf Of Will Moffat
>>> Sent: Wednesday, June 04, 2008 10:21 AM
>>> To: Freebase API and apps built on Freebase For discussions about  
>>> MQL
>>> Subject: [Developers] South Carolina weirdness
>>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> The trivial query below fails because South Carolina has two values
>>> for "capital" even though the schema says the property must be
>>> unique.
>>> This will break applications written against the schema. Are there
>>> tools that warn about this problem? Should they be exposed in the
>>> Freebase UI?
>>>
>>> I cannot delete the extra value 'Charleston' using the Freebase.com
>>> UI
>>>
>>> Weird thing no. 3 is that I cannot see any record of "capital" ever
>>> being changed in the history view.
>>>
>>> http://www.freebase.com/tools/queryeditor/?q=[{"*":null,"type":"/
>>> location/us_state"}]
>>> http://www.freebase.com/view/en/south_carolina
>>> http://www.freebase.com/history/topic/en/south_carolina
>>>
>>> regards,
>>> --Will
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