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Date: Thu, 05 Feb 2009 16:00:34 +0100
From: Michael Marks <michael.marks@gmx.de>
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To: user@couchdb.apache.org
Subject: Re: Reduce to nothing
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How about having a third attribute "state": with possible values 
"active", "cancelled" and filtering about this one?

________________________________________
Michael Marks


Matt Goodall schrieb:
> 2009/2/5 Jeremy Wall <jwall@google.com>:
>   
>> Can't you just have the map screen out the cancellations? Seems like that's
>> the most natural spot for the behaviour you want.
>>     
>
> Nope, because the "thing" doesn't know it's been cancelled.
>
> - Matt
>
>
>   
>> On Feb 5, 2009 8:34 AM, "Matt Goodall" <matt.goodall@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Is it possible to reduce a key to nothing, i.e. completely remove a
>> key from the reduction result.
>>
>> For instance, say you post three documents:
>>
>>   {"_id": "thing1", "type": "thing"}
>>   {"_id": "thing2", "type": "thing"}
>>   {"_id": "...", "type": "cancellation", "cancels": "thing1"}
>>
>> It's trivial to produce a map function that collates the "thing" and
>> "cancellation" documents. However, I can't work out how, or even it
>> it's possible, to reduce the view that so that only "thing2" remains.
>>
>> This seems like it might be a useful thing to be able to do at times.
>> For instance, posting a "cancellation" document effectively removes a
>> "thing" from the database. Nothing needs to touch the "thing",
>> avoiding any chance of conflicts and it doesn't matter how many
>> "cancellation" documents get posted making cancellation an idempotent
>> operation.
>>
>> I tried not returning anything, just in case it worked ;-), but got a
>> JSON encoding error (can't encode undefined, iirc). That would be a
>> simple approach. However, I wondered if the more "normal" approach of
>> allowing a reduce function to emit zero or more (key, value) pairs
>> would be even better? Not sure if that would break the incremental
>> reduce though.
>>
>> Any ideas, or is there another way to achieve this that I'm missing?
>>
>> - Matt
>>
>>     
>
>   

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