How to work with external data ?

@tykus Ok thank you.

While I fully trust the data I'm working with when I have everything locally, having never worked with remote data before, I don't know how much confidence I can have in it or whether I should implement any code to ensure everything is working properly.

Well ... for example do I have to fear having occasionally issues with the IDs of remote records ?

@vincent15000 will price be different?

@jlrdw Will price be different ? Hmmm I don't understand what you mean.

@vincent15000 Price of the product, will it change when you present it.

@vincent15000 I don't know... but I suppose any public facing API that provides entity IDs will be consistent with those identifiers.

How are you intending to use the third party data; is it being listed (index action) / detailed (show action) by your application. How easy / fast is it to fetch and arrange that data for either of those use cases? Are there request quotas that might be exceeded if you were hitting those third party APIs every time your users are using your app?

@jlrdw Write a code to synchronize local and remote datas take more time than just use remote datas.

So yes the price of the product will change.

@tykus I need to store in the local database some calculations related to the remote data, so for example I will use the id of the remote data to identify locally which remote data is concerned by the calculation.

calculations : id, remote_id, result, // other data

If the remote id changes, the local datas are not consistent any more.

But I think that this would also be the case for any synchronization.

@vincent15000 if id's are not the same, could you use the product id if it's the same and unique.

@jlrdw Well no, the users don't necessarily define any product id. But this gives me an idea, I could for example generate a unique id locally and update the remote database via the API with this unique id (for example a UUID or an ULID). This could be the unique reference I need.

What do you think about ?

UPDATED I just noticed that it's exactly what you suggest me to do : use another field as unique reference for each product.

@vincent15000 why do you think that the ID on the third party API might change?

@tykus I really don't know why it could change, but as I don't know what can happen in the remote database, I'm searching for another way to ensure that product 1 is really product 1.

@vincent15000 I wouldn't invent a different way of reconciling the product ID until you know its a problem.

Suppose you add a UUID into the pipedrive product, and then the user clones the product in pipedrive and the clone gets the UUID of the original. Now you are in a mess.

This broader question cannot be answered without knowing how you intend to use the data. (how many users, how often accessed etc).

@vincent15000 yes if doing any updates or inserts of that data in your database. Still not fully sure what you are doing with the data.

@jlrdw @snapey What I'm doing with the data ... just retrieve them from the remote database, do some calculations and store the results of the calculations in the local database with the remote id.

Per pipedrive account, there will be around 10 to 20 users, they will access the application perhaps twice a day.

If you were waiting for another answer about what I'm doing with the data, if you need more precisions, please tell me so that I can give a more precise answer.

@vincent15000 I think your approach here is fine. I think keeping it simple at first and adapting it overtime is better than over-engineering a solution.

In the past when I've worked with remote data I also kept a source column which would be the JSON or blob of data the original data came from. This way I could reprocess any data if needed. I haven't needed that column yet though :P

@cgsmith105 Sorry there are many suggestions in the comments, which approch is fine ?

@vincent15000 To be specific:

• Retrieve the remote data
• Perform the calculations and save with remote_id

The latter of your schema which just has a results table. This keeps the logic simple and isn't over engineered.

This only makes sense if you can reference the canonical URI of the upstream data source.

@cgsmith105 Ok so this one.

results : id, quantity, amount, product_id

What do you mean saying that it only makes sense if I can reference the canonical URI of the upstream data source ?

@vincent15000 correct

If product_id is referencing the Pipedrive identifier then I think you are all set. If the Pipedrive source URL changes then maybe you should have a source_url field or something similar.

I am assuming the data is one-to-one? If the results is just a computation of multiple source items then disregard :)

Naturally: Many ways to program - this would be my approach.

@cgsmith105 Ok the calculations are about a sale and a sale can contain several products.

The calculation is done from the datas of the sale and/or the products. But the result is stored exclusively binded to the pipedrive sale id.

@vincent15000 you could make these child records using a foreign key.

@jlrdw Like the latter example in my post ?

results : id, quantity, amount, pipedrive_product_id