Database Design Doc

I'm trying to understand the system better, especially how Profiles work.  Is there a document that describes each table and how it relates to the others?

If not, could someone describe the LKey system?  In particular, how does the profile fields table (sys_profile_fields) tie to the captions?  Is there some sort of automatic system that adds __ to the original field name?  And then a _View and _Edit?  Or something like that?

I'm a newbie to the system, there are a lot of tables (and a lot of power and flexibility), so coming up to speed takes a little bit of time.  I was hoping the Profiler module, with caching off, would show me a lot of the queries, but there appears to be some jQuery / Profiler issues.

Thanks,

Tac

I'm getting a bit closer, I think I understand that to get a string for Edit you do something like

"select `String`

from sys_localization_keys lk

inner join sys_localization_strings ls

on (ls.IDKey = lk.ID)

where `Key`=%s", sprintf('_FieldCaption_%s_Edit', $d->Name)

Some of the keys are have a space and begin with a capital letter, others are all lowercase and have underscores for the spaces (e.g. '_Activate account' and '_active_story').  Is there some pattern to these?

BTW, I respect the amount of work that goes into building a system that allows for localization.  Even though at the moment I feel like it's a lot of chasing down tables to find a simple Caption, the reality is that multi-lingual systems are complicated.  That being said, if there's any documentation about how the internals work, it'd be very helpful!  I'm trying to figure out what I need to do to import profile metadata from another system, and of course it's non-trivial to do so.

Tac

I have not seen a 'specification' document for the database.

I agree it would be nice to have as I have wasted many days figuring out the how and why of the database.

Your best bet for finding this kind of information, or requesting it, is this thread: http://www.boonex.com/unity/forums/topic/Developers-Links.htm