Unified Open R&D: compare program/course models in Open and our other projects about open-discussions

[collinpreston]

Considering the tiny amount of overlap between the two data models, I think it would be best to have an e-commerce model structure that exists separately from the current course-catalog model structure. Additionally, having a separate data model for e-commerce would allow us to build e-commerce functionality into it's own service, or migrate to a different e-commerce solution if we wanted to do so in the future.

So to help understand what models would generally be required to support our e-commerce requirements, I sketched out an ER diagram:

I also generated a similar ER diagram for the current course-catalog application in Open:

The course-catalog model structure is much more elaborate than the proposed e-commerce structure. The only piece of data shared between both model structures is "price" which is used during filtering and the front-end when displaying courses and programs.

You can view both model structure ER diagrams here