[Book] Terminology page for dojo.data has erroneous material

[skinner]

In the Dojo Book, in the section about "Using dojo.data", the page for "dojo.data Terminology" has some misinformation.

Here's the page: http://dojotoolkit.org/book/dojo-book-0-9/part-3-programmatic-dijit-and-dojo/data-retrieval-dojo-data/dojo-data-terminology

The most problematic line is the one that says a dojo.data "data source" is equivalent to a database "table". That's wrong. A dojo.data "data source" is more closely equivalent to an entire database, including one or more tables. That mis-statement, in combination with the lack of a schema API, I think creates confusion about the dojo.data APIs.

Jared drafted a new version of that entire page, back in July 2007. Here was his suggested replacement:

---

datastore::

A JavaScript? object that reads data from a data source and makes that data available as data items via the dojo.data APIs

datasource::

The place that the raw data comes from. For example, in a CsvStore?, the data source would the the .csv formatted file the store loaded. In general, the data source could be a file, a database server, a web service, or something else completely.

item::

A data item that has attributes with attribute values.

attribute::

One of the fields or properties of an item.

value::

The contents of an attribute for a given item.

reference::

A value in an item that points to another item

identity::

Some sort of identifier that can be used to uniquely identify an item within the context of a single datastore.

query::

Some sort of specification or request that asks a datastore for some subset of the items it knows about. A query will often be an object with a set of attribute/value pairs that define out what attributes should be matched. It is possible, however, that the query be a string or a number as well. It is highly recommended that all stores try to use an object structure of attribute name/value pairs as the query format for consistency between stores.

dojo.data APIs::

The standard set of functions that datastore implements. The dojo.data.api module includes a set of APIs (Read, Write, etcera.), and a datastore may implement one or more of the APIs.

internal data representation::

The private data structures that a datastore uses to cache data in local memory (XML DOM nodes, anonymous JSON objects, arrays of arrays, etc.)

[Adam Peller]

please log comments directly into the book (I guess you can reference this closed ticket rather than re-type it :-)