The register said a restored medication keeps today's schedule and loses
the record of when the dose or the timing moved. Measured, it costs more
than a record: the band minter reads each past day against the schedule
that was live THEN, so an account that came back without its eras had its
own compliance history rewritten against a plan it was never on.
The hard part was supersededByRevisionId, the pointer from a corrected
ARCHIVED era to the MANUAL row that replaced it. Three things about it
had to be settled.
It is a bare id column with no relation, so nothing in the database
refuses a value that points at nothing. That makes losing it quieter and
worse than a broken foreign key would be: every era consumer SKIPS a row
that carries the pointer, so a corrected era whose link came back null
goes live again beside its own correction, and the timeline shows one
window twice with past days minted against whichever the query read
first.
A portable restore mints fresh ids, so the pointer cannot travel as one.
It travels as a POSITION in the drug's own ordered era list. That list is
the only address space both ends share: the builder sorts it totally
(validFrom, then createdAt, then id) so two eras sharing an instant
cannot swap places between two exports of the same account, and the
pointer never crosses a drug, because every route that writes it scopes
the update to one medication. The same mechanism serves both purposes
rather than one carrying ids and the other positions.
Writing it needs two passes, because the row a link addresses is as often
written after the row addressing it as before. Pass one creates every era
with the link null; pass two patches the links once every position has an
id.
A hand-edited file that names a position out of range, or an era's own
position, gets the era and not the pointer, and the position is reported
as scheduleRevisionLink with the JSON path into the file. Refusing the
file would cost an operator every era of every drug over one bad integer,
and writing the link would point a correction at whatever row happened to
be there. A row that supersedes itself is treated the same way: every
consumer would skip it, so the era would vanish from the timeline while
still sitting in the table.
The round trip seeds three eras with one supersede among them and asserts
the shape of the chain, then asserts that exactly two are live. Three
rows with every link null satisfies any count and has thrown away the
only thing the pointer says.
Marc-André Bombeck
a74dc289a8