UBF assoc lists

Hi UBFers,

So, one of the biggest applications I have of UBF type stuff is sending 
user profile data between servers. This data tends to be clumped into 
batches of tens to thousands of records, consisting of from 1 to a 
couple hundred fields. It can also consist of one record for "real 
time" data synchronization.

I've tended to send records with name,value pairs, so that empty fields 
are not sent. This saves quite a bit of bandwidth of there are just a 
few fields to send out of a couple hundred.

My challenge is to apply this to UBF.

First thought, a list of structs of two elements each:

{12345 # {'first-name' "John"} & {'last-name "Smith"} & } $

(where 12345 is the user id}

but sending the constants for holding names would kill al of bandwidth.

So, perhaps the field name constants could be stored in the regsiter. 
Well, the register is limited in size, about a couple hundred free 
bytes. The those bytes may be slowly disappearing :).

So, what about extending the register to have arbitrary byte sequences 
indexes? Then...

  'first-name' >f1
  'last-name' >f2
  {12345 # {f1 "John"} & {f2 "Smith"} & } $

Just a thought.

Erik.

(And yes, I do realize that by taking the field names out of the realm 
of UBF(B) that I'm giving up type checking and verification at the 
UBF(B) level -- I guess it becomes the application's responsibility -- 
but it might be nice to explore that some more...)

Erik Pearson
Adaptations
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