One of the questions that has been in my mind since before I started building LIDA is “How do we handle organizations that need to manage more than one music library?”
An example of this might be a community band that has a Concert Band, a Swing Band, an Oompah Band, and Outreach Ensembles. They might need to manage four different music libraries.
Or even more specific, a church might need to manage a choral library, an orchestral library, and a praise band library.
I’m sure there are many variations of this same need among all the music libraries and librarians around the world.
Initially, I found this concept quite daunting from a programming angle. I could see how it would be possible to do with some extensive coding, and some massive restructuring of the data tables, but GOOD GRIEF! The complexity of such a task was making me dizzy.
Then one of our beta testers, David in New Hampshire, mentioned in passing a concept that was brilliant in its simplicity, and it SOLVES the challenge, it answers the question: “How do we handle organizations that need to manage more than one library?”The answer lies in the fact that in LIDA, we keep the data in a different file than the code. We do this because this will allow us to issue updates to the LIDA code without worrying that we will compromise a user’s data.
But this also gives the users the opportunity to have more than one data file, each one called by a different name, one for each music library they manage.
All we need to do in an upcoming version of LIDA is to give the users the capability to “Connect to a different data file.”
We don’t have that capability in the current beta version (0.8.006 as I write this), but we will soon, and it will be a much less daunting task than if I were to try to build this capability right into the code of LIDA.
We already have the code built for LIDA to automatically reconnect to the data file, in the event the user has moved it to another location, so it should be a relatively simple matter to copy and adapt that code to give the user the option to connect to any data file they have.
Can you see why I and several of the beta testers are so excited about where we are headed with LIDA?
Stay tuned for more excitement.