Are you going to use relational database to store this data?
Or you goint to use image saving / object-oriented DB for persistence?

Than, can you please describe your task / domain model with more details?
Particularly:
1) Are there strong asymmetry in queries? Which kind of queries are more frequent: "give me tags of this radio" or "give me radios with this tag"?
2) Do you need to store other information EXCEPT fact that that radio is marked by this tag? For example, do you need to store the time tag was assigned to the station or the user who have assigned it? You got the idea, I believe.
3) Are queries simple "stations with tag X" / "tags of station X", or they may often looks like "stations with tag A or B, but not both" or something even more complicated.

Best approach is strongly depends on the answers. "By default", however, I will make Station with collection of Tags as the "main information storage". And I will make some kind of "request" when asked about list of station with some tag. Cache this result, if needed for performance.

But if you plan to use relational persistence backend, than collections on the either side will be the good idea. And you can use GLORP quite easy for this.


2016-12-13 23:59 GMT+03:00 sergio ruiz <sergio.rrd@gmail.com>:
Hello, all.

This question is not as much a question about smalltalk as one about modeling in smalltalk.

I am currently writing an API using Teapot that will be serving up data about internet radio stations. I want to be able to let users tag the stations with arbitrary tags. Using a relational database, I would create an object like "Tagging" with foreign keys pointing to the "Stations" class and the "Tag" Class. It would have station_id and tag_id.

If this was going to be even a tiny bit more complex, I would probably just make it a polymorphic association.��

My question is, how would I approach this in smalltalk? Would I just make methods on tag and station (and whatever else) that stored arrays of each other? Would I create an intermediary model like "Tagging" and have that do the heavy lifting?

Ideas? Thanks!;


----
peace,
sergio
photographer, journalist, visionary