Well while developing a web application that allow users to draw graphs (flow ch

Question

Well while developing a web application that allow users to draw graphs (flow charts, ER diagram , UML, .... etc) the information of drawn items and their relation to each other and position on canvas is expressed as JSON object

The question is:

1- is saving such graph in database as raw (json object text) is enough (in one field of a table) 2- or is it always required to break down the json object into logical pieces and store them into a well built database structure!

option 1- other than making devilopers life easier it will eleminate the need of recreating json object from small bits and pieces of information when the user open a graph he have built and saved long time ago

option 2- will have fine grain details in proper structure but will cost kind of heavy processing while opening a saved graph from Database

which way is correct way to go ?

Explanation / Answer

Splitting a user's drawing up into nodes and edges (and all their associated attributes) and storing them in tables would give you the advantage of being able to query a drawing.

The question is: do you really need that functionality? Or could you get away with just storing some metadata with the text representation of the graph?

Consider that there will be a lot more work involved in getting a drawing out of the database if it has many nodes, compared to extracting one large text field.

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