An inheritance model for documents in web applications with sydonie

Each web site has to manage documents tailored for its specific needs. When building applications with a specific document model, web developers must make a choice: build from scratch or use existing tools with the need to accomodate the model. We propose an inheritance model for documents, implemented in the Sydonie open source web development framework. It offers a flexible environment to create classes of documents. Sydonie's document model uses entity nodes inspired by the Functional Requirements for Bibliographics Records (FRBR). Document content and metadata are modeled using a set of relations between entity nodes and attribute objects. Classes of documents or attribute types can be defined through a declarative XML file. Our inheritance model provides the possibility to define them at the framework level, application profile level or application level. This demonstration explains the document definition process and inheritance model implemented in the framework and gives several examples of its advantages.