Master/Child DCRs

System

I am responsible for two templating solutions which were designed before I became involved with this project. One has already been implemented and the other is commencing development. In each solution, zero or more child DCRs of various types are associated with a master DCR. Each parent and child DCR gets its own database identifier and there are no issues maintaining the relationships between the records in the database.

The users have complained about the first solution because it is difficult to determine the relationships between the DCRs using the filesystem - each DCR has its database key in the filename but not the database key of the parent record, so finding the children associated with a parent is near impossible. For various reasons renaming the child DCRs to include the master record identifier may not be an option, but even if the child DCR names did reference the parent it could still be tricky, time consuming and error-prone to locate all the child records (navigate to each child's data directory and look for files with the parent ID). For the existing solution we are considering implementing a CGI or JSP DCT callout in the master DCR that would query the database and provide CCI links to all of the child DCRs. A similar thing could be implemented for the second solution, but another alternative under consideration would be adding fields in the master DCR to contain references to the child DCRs, with a callout next to each to allow edit. In most cases there is either zero or one record of each child type for each master DCR, but there are cases where there are multiple child records of the same type for a single master DCR. This means if we do implement the references to the child DCRs in the master DCT each may have to be contained in a replicant. Some kind of child DCR file naming logic would probably be needed in the master DCR.

I don't think either solution would be (technically) too complicated to implement, but I'm wondering what alternatives I'm not seeing and what's working for other organizations with similar requirements.

One of the issues I can see is how the actual edit links CCIs are implemented in the master DCR. I would like to have the CGI/JSP display standard CCI edit links, but as far as I know these only work for existing DCRs - is there any way to create an edit link that creates the DCR of a given name if it does not already exist? I would prefer to avoid having templates for each child DCR and creating the file system entry myself. Or alternatively is there any way to encode a CCI "newdcr" link in such a way that on save the DCR will be named based on a URL parameter passed in the link? Is there any way FormAPI can access custom URL parameters passed on the standard "newdcr" CCI link (so my FormAPI could automatically name the DCR as needed on save)?