It has been suggested by a BA who also happens to be fairly "techy" that we use BIT processing to determine if specific conditions are met.
This is his reasoning; I don't know where he got it. I added the bold format:
So, I get the concept, I think, but I wonder if it's worth it. To me, this is making the program more complicated to maintain by "normal" developers later on and "old-school" developers in general. Especially since we're using it to decide whether or not to highlight differences in the data. For example, most of our inventory is counted in "Each" but some are in "MP" (1,000 pieces), and on the screen that we're building, they want us to highlight the MP so it's obvious.
History tells me that they will have other things that they want to highlight in the future, so if we just use flags in the table, we'll have 5 now and will have to add 15 later. The BA who is asking for this has had bad experiences with the old physical files that we use (and developers have been afraid to change!), but now we use SQL tables for about everything and I've found it very easy to add fields.
I respect everyone on this forum, so I have to ask: should we do this or should I fight him and tell him not to worry about HOW we do what we do. What do you think?
As always, thank you for your time.
This is his reasoning; I don't know where he got it. I added the bold format:
"The concept of Enumeration (also referred to as bit flags) allows many “flag” values to be stored in one field. A flag field is a Boolean data type meaning the value is either 0 (false) or 1 (true). The value of the flags can be updated or read using bitwise operators AND, OR, and NOT. The traditional way of storing these values is to use a separate database field for each flag. However, adding a flag requires changes to the code that evaluates the value of the flag and requires a new field to be added to the database. Using enumeration, adding a new flag requires code changes, but not database changes."
So, I get the concept, I think, but I wonder if it's worth it. To me, this is making the program more complicated to maintain by "normal" developers later on and "old-school" developers in general. Especially since we're using it to decide whether or not to highlight differences in the data. For example, most of our inventory is counted in "Each" but some are in "MP" (1,000 pieces), and on the screen that we're building, they want us to highlight the MP so it's obvious.
History tells me that they will have other things that they want to highlight in the future, so if we just use flags in the table, we'll have 5 now and will have to add 15 later. The BA who is asking for this has had bad experiences with the old physical files that we use (and developers have been afraid to change!), but now we use SQL tables for about everything and I've found it very easy to add fields.
I respect everyone on this forum, so I have to ask: should we do this or should I fight him and tell him not to worry about HOW we do what we do. What do you think?
As always, thank you for your time.
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